Wrigley’s Does (Mostly) A Good Thing
Wrigley’s Doublemint gum changed their packaging recently. They trumpet the elimination of “about 850 metric tons of foil” in the packaging. But was that the reason they did it and could they have done more? I think it’s admirable that they’ve changed from foil to paper. I really do. But if you read the news story in the link above, you won’t find any mention of foil and landfills. You’ll find that paper is 13% cheaper than foil, so they are saving some enormous amount of money.
Saving money is a positive thing too. The problem is that they haven’t removed all the foil from the product. If you are going to make a change, why go halfway? If you click on the small photo of the package of gum up at the top left corner of this point you’ll see a photo of what the package looks like. It’s got a cellophane wrapper around it, presumably for freshness. So if they’ve got an air-tight package and they’ve removed the individual foil wrappers, what do they need any foil at all for?
This is frustrating, because it means, I think, that even though you can recycle the new, individual paper wrappers, you can’t recycle the package that the gum comes in. Why not? Because it has foil in it. You’ll have to rip out the foil first.
