EASTER EGGS ARE OVER-PACKAGED ON PURPOSE
By Adam Clancy
Easter eggs have been given as gifts around the holiday time for centuries, but the modern eggs are mostly made of chocolate and hidden in large amount of packaging.
There’s a reason for this. Sustainable packaging expert Ian Cooper, who has worked for Kinnerton, an Easter Egg manufacturer for Marks and Spencer’s and Waitrose, says Easter Eggs are over-packaged because they are a "luxury item” and “the opening experience is part of the product.”
The opening experience and the over-packaging may count towards the price of an Easter egg, but customers must decide whether they’re getting their money’s worth.
Research last year from consumer group Which? showed that packaging makes up over a quarter of some of the UK’s best-selling Easter eggs' weight.
All that packaging! But, it's there for a reason.
Thorntons’ Classic Large Egg had the highest percentage of packaging with 36.4% of the product’s weight being made up of the box and protective plastic.
Can Easter egg packaging be made more sustainable? Delia Gadea is a sustainability expert from food waste company OLIO. She argues that instead of focusing on how recyclable the packaging is, the attention should be on how it can be re-used: “Recycling is incredibly resource-intensive,” Delia says.
Companies such as Unilever and Procter and Gamble have collaborated to launch Loop, the first e-commerce company with all re-usable packaging.
Under the Packaging Essential Requirements legislation (2014), at least part of the packaging of any product must be recyclable. For Easter Eggs, all cardboard boxes are but not all plastics.
Ian Cooper argues making the whole packaging recyclable would benefit not just the environment but the marketers as well. “It will give the biggest possible price margin because the unit cost per gram of chocolate goes up,” he argues.
Marketers can only sell what’s in front of them and Ian says they determine the price of Easter Eggs by size above all.
There’s a difference between packaging being recyclable and recycled, and this is where the consumer comes in. If packaging isn’t recycled properly, then it’s no longer recyclable. Ian blames the ‘can’t be bothered’ attitude of some consumers and highlights the nature of this problem. “None of this is new, this has been going on for 20 years,” he says.
Consumers can help reduce Easter egg packaging waste by placing them in recycling bins or re-using them in another way.