Have you ever moved out?

If you haven’t done it, yet don’t worry: you will still understand what this article is about. Even if you had always lived in with your parents and have never faced the mess of carrying all your stuff along on the road I am sure you are not living on a desert island. This definitely means you know very well what I am talking about.

Packaging: in tropical countries palms’ leaves are used as packaging material. And they are really functional for bringing around sticky rice cakes and anything else you can deliciously image. They are also nice looking: try to imagine how dreamlike picking your food from a palm leaf sitting under a banana tree while admiring an emerald rice field dotted with the same palms from which you are eating. Dream like for westerns: locals are in love with our "traditional" plastic shoppers…

As you might easily guess in so-called industrialized countries packaging is not so natural but it is still nice looking. A nice looking need. How could we bring stuff around without packaging? We cannot do like the French carrying hot smelling baguettes under their arm pit. We would need many more armpits than any French can have.

Marketing is everywhere just as packaging. And, of course, designers have realized it and figured out what a big working opportunity packaging could be for them. They have taken their chance: designers work on packaging all the time as covers are the first thing that meet our eyes. And sometimes it might be the only thing we get of a product if our family eats all the cookies before we even get to smell them. Therefore, disguising commercials is very easy when packaging are around (the goods).

We see that packaging is everywhere, but is it all alike?

Of course life is complex. We all know it especially the working parents… But don’t worry, the packaging categories are extremely simple:

first, second and third kind: that is what your child learns at elementary school. When you buy a milk bottle the bottle makes the first kind of packaging, the ones that allow you to forget home the empty bottle that in some shops you could use for refilling. First kind of packaging sometimes servers our laziness or absent mind. Second kind: the big box that contains several milk bottles or whatever else, the ones that parents that do big shopping would like to buy all (and so forget shopping for a while while relaxing cleaning the house).Third kind of packaging is used to transport goods to the selling place, this is the one kind of packaging we never get to see as others work hard to unpack it and nicely set the items, food or whatever other goods, on the shelves for us to pick them and put them in the trolley and for our children to put them out while we are not watching.

How much packaging do we normally use?

Sometimes the right necessary quantity, sometimes, as in all things we easily end up exaggerating…In Germany, they even got a word to say it: Verpackungsflut, the excessive use of packaging. If they bothered inventing a word that must mean that the problem exists.

Some kind of packaging is necessary although too much is a waste of resources and a source of pollution. The appropriate goal of packaging is NOT to have us get crazy trying to unwrap some very delicious and very tightly packed snack. Packaging is important for the hygiene and preservation of food and other items and to be effective it must meet some criteria. Packaging material must be according to the law and protect food from getting contaminated. When it is needed first kind of packaging must inform us about the expiration date of the product, not only in case of food but also cosmetics, for instance.

Isn’t it funny how things we seldom notice, such as packaging, maybe so important? Keeping our eyes skinned on things that usually are not on the spotlight might help us understand more of this world and might also give us the chance to look at the cover, and then, once we analyzed it, be capable of looking beyond.