Photo by Ed Townend
After 10 years of good service, my cutlery was in dire need of replacement. 2 teaspoons had broken, a fork had gone AWOL, and the metallic coat was chipping off which meant I occasionally found wee shards of metal in my food.
So, what is a greenie to do in this situation? There seems to be a distinct gap in the eco market for cutlery, unless you go on lots of picnics, so I was keeping an eye out for what I could see in stores. And there wasn't much.
Finally, in Sainsbury's last Friday, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and just buy some. I wasn't after a silver service set, so my choice came down to some cheap and cheerful stuff much like my old cutlery, or an overpriced set with Jamie Oliver's face on the box.
Naturally, I chose cheap and cheerful. £10, reduced to £5. After all, if my last cheap and cheerful set lasted me 10 years, then there's no reason to suspect the next lot won't either.
I wasn't too enamoured by the plastic ties holding the four "display" pieces of cutlery to the front of the box, but the box was small, easily-recycled cardboard and all the other pieces were out of view in the back, so minimum packaging.
Imagine my shock, then, when I got home and opened the box to find this:
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It's hard to tell from the photo, but every piece of cutlery was individually wrapped in it's own wee plastic bag. Well, I say "wrapped" but actually the bags were open at one end, so there's not even a hygiene issue here. And even if there was, who uses cutlery without washing it first?
2 comments:
I had the same shock when I bought my own cutlery set; it was and continues to be completely illogical. Worst still, despite hours of ranking my brains, I couldn't think of anyway to reuse these extremely narrow and open ended slips of plastic. Next time I need cutlery I'm just going to create my own mismatched set from charity shops - as you said all you need to do is wash before use.
You havn't thought this one through. Rather than look at what appears as pure waste, you must remember you are at the the end point of a chain that starts with initial manufacture through distribution eventually to yourself.
These same knives, forks etc may also be sold in bulk elsewhere, for instance department stores may receive spoons in boxes of say 500 and certainly many would have been shipped in bulk rather than sets of 6 each.
As a manufacturer how would you ensure that this cutlery arrived at the final customer in pristine condition and did not look like it had been used in the works canteen in between?
And what would be the comparitive cost be in materials and labour and lost sales through scratched and bent cuttlery?
I willing to bet that plastic sleeves are one of the most efficient (=environmental friendly) ways of achieving this, and of course you no doubt were able recycle the plastic to make it even better.
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