Driven by money, over environment

Today’s major corporations make it nearly impossible for the average person to be environmentally conscious by packaging their products in an excessively wasteful way that is appealing to consumers and not the environment. For instance, I myself work at a pharmacy that orders from a lot of major distributers for household goods. Literally anything from toothpaste, to vitamin supplements come into the store on a daily basis, often in what we call “pre-packs”.

A prepack is a convenient disposable stand that the manufacturer sends us in hopes that we will put it in an aisle, giving them more advertisement space and selling their product faster. These prepacks are not only made out of an unruly amount of plastic and paper products, but they are stuffed with cardboard spacers to ensure the products conveniently stay in place.

A much more sensible solution would be to send a single pre pack, then put the remaining products into compact and efficiently packaged boxes. If I’m disgusted with the amount of waste produced by a local pharmacy, I want you to imagine a big box store chain such as Walmart. The fact that manufacturers or consumers are even given the option to produce this much waste for convenience sake is an absolute shame, and the only entity that can step in and do something is our government. Stricter laws and regulations need to be placed on the packaging of consumer goods, because the market is driven to make money and not be environmentally conscious. Philip Stewart, Charlottetown