Costco plastic packaging will outlive us.

The Graduate, 1967, "Plastics" scene

     "I just want to say one word to you. One word. Are you listening?

     ("Yes, sir.")

     Plastics. There's a great future in plastics. Think about it." 

   

There is indeed a great and very long future for plastics, 500 years and longer.  

Let's think about Costco a moment.

Today is Sunday and it is a day off from Trump, Biden, political messaging, and the Mail Tribune. People have asked if the Mail Tribune has threatened to sue me for posts of the past two days, posts they might consider unflattering. No. At least not yet. If they are smart they will ignore me, but their history is not to be smart with me or others who dare criticize them. Instead they perpetuate and exacerbate their mistakes, making a bad situation worse for themselves. We will see. I will keep readers apprised.

I love Costco. I am not proud of it, but I cannot help myself.  

Costco is the American cornucopia, the reality and metaphor for abundance to the point of excess. The wealth of the world comes to the door of Americans. We are so privileged. I have a sense of American greatness at the store, from the extra-wide parking slots, to the wide aisles, to the mountains of stuff stacked high. The baked goods are in gigantic portions, the displays are huge, the packages of any one thing are huge. It all feels sanitary, which I appreciate. Everything is sealed up tightly in plastic.

Apple protective shell

That is also the problem. Plastic packaging. Part of the Costco business model is to minimize store display costs by requiring vendors to supply goods in ready-to-display pallets. Some products, like 8-pack cans of tuna, held together by a plastic wrap, stack nicely. Other products need packages that need another package so they stack on pallets, which are themselves stacked.

Expensive small items, like razor blades, deal with the potential theft issue by packaging them in large quantities--multiple razor sleeves--and then attaching them to a big piece of cardboard covered in a hard plastic shell.

Apple shell, crushed

The apples I purchased at Costco were perfect--unblemished and unbruised. They come in a rigid single-use plastic container. The shell is 12 inches by 16 inches by 5 inches. It does not shred, crumple, or compact much, even after a 180 pound adult man stands on it, shuffles his feet and does his best to reduce its size before putting it into his garbage container. The apples will be gone in a couple of days--reduced to organic nothing-ness. I will certainly be gone soon enough, dust to dust. The plastic will stick around.

There are various kinds of plastics. A very, very few kinds are ones made of materials that dissolve in a decade. Most packaging in our lives are made for inexpensiveness and durability, not biodegradability.  There is Polyethylene Terephthalate, Low Density Polyethylene, Polyethylene Terephthalate, Polypropylene, Polystyrene, and Polyvinyl Chloride, all used for packaging.

I don't understand the chemistry of any of these. I list them to make a point of the variety. My guess is that few if any of my readers know the difference either.

I do know they aren't recycled. Most simply cannot be. There is nobody who wants them for recycling. China, which formerly took plastic as Americans filled otherwise-empty shipping containers to ship back, no longer wants them. They don't have the cheap labor anymore to separate one kind of plastic from another. The Costco packaging shouldn't be burned, and isn't. It goes into landfills where it lasts for centuries. When it breaks down it doesn't disappear or become organic. It disintegrates into smaller and smaller pieces, which eventually get into our groundwater, and eventually the ocean.

Giant amounts of plastic packaging are not unique to Costco, but its stackable warehouse display system of supersized packaging with every product containerized, makes Costco the prime example of package excess.

Costco says they recognize a problem. A 2006 article in Packaging World describes some of Costco's prior efforts to be more environmentally friendly, and it quotes a Costco executive noting that customers complained about the difficulty of opening packages, the sharp edges, and the sheer amount. The article observes Costco's "materials selection centers on factors other than environmental friendliness alone" quoting the executive saying he wanted "an upscale look." Click  

They are still working on packaging. In the Costco website today the tone is one of concern for sustainability and waste, but when one reads what they plan to do, if anything, the denoted content is one of "tradeoffs" and "challenges." They talk about cardboard and use photographs of it to illustrate what they are doing, but use plastic and don't deny it. The products shine through and glisten under rigid plastic--that sanitary upscale look. Costco packages the way it does because it fits their business model, and the waste products are someone else's problem.

 https://www.costco.com/sustainability-packaging.html

I am a hypocrite to point out my concern. I shop there. The photographs I show here are of products I bought yesterday. (But not  the muffins; they are about 800 calories each. I just cannot do it.) The apples are great; I ate one. The razors are inexpensive, and I used the big shears I use for cutting brush at my farm to muscle through the hard shell. On garbage pickup day all this will be on its way to the landfill.

If I ever have great-great-great-great-great-great. . . grandchildren I will be gone and long forgotten. But the container protecting the apples that helped feed me for a few days will still be there, my nuisance gift to posterity.