China's General Rules on Restricting Excessive Packaging Pass Review, Setting Limits on Void Ratio, Layers and Cost for Six Categories

The 'Three Sins' of Excessive Packaging

The first issue is the large-scale consumption of resources, which adds pressure to an already strained environment and resource base and goes against China's goal of building a conservation-minded society.

The second issue is that China's current recovery rate for packaging waste remains low, making such waste a major source of municipal refuse.

The third issue is that excessive packaging encourages gift-giving among consumers, creates conditions for corruption and harms the broader social atmosphere.

Overpacked goods leave consumers frustrated and complaining, while also wasting significant resources and energy. With packaging standards absent, excessive packaging has persisted despite repeated prohibitions. Recently, the mandatory national standard General Rules for Restricting Excessive Packaging of Commodities was approved by the review committee. The standard sets out basic requirements, limit requirements and calculation methods for curbing excessive packaging; for certain products, the packaging limit requirements are mandatory clauses.

According to available information, the General Rules impose limit requirements on six main product groups: alcoholic beverages, pastries (excluding mooncakes), cosmetics, health foods, tea and grain. These limits cover two areas: packaging void ratio and number of packaging layers. The packaging void ratio is the ratio of unnecessary space inside a product's sales packaging to the volume of that sales packaging. Under the standard, alcoholic beverages and pastries must keep their packaging void ratio at or below 55%; cosmetics and health foods at or below 50%; tea at or below 25%; and grain at or below 10%.

The number of packaging layers refers to the layers that fully wrap the product, excluding primary packaging that directly contacts the product. The standard states that alcoholic beverages, pastries, cosmetics, health foods and tea must have no more than 3 packaging layers.

The standard also specifies that, for the six categories — alcoholic beverages, pastries, cosmetics, health foods, tea and grain — the combined cost of all packaging other than primary packaging should not exceed 15% of the product's ex-factory price.

The standard requires that commodity packaging achieve appropriate material use, material reduction and simplified structure, and that packaging costs be strictly controlled on that basis.

Appropriate material use: choose suitable packaging materials based on the product's characteristics and quality; packaging should preferably use a single material or materials that are easy to separate; materials should preferably be relatively abundant and recyclable.

Material reduction: while meeting the basic functions of commodity packaging, design and periodically evaluate packaging material use to reduce the amount of material consumed.

Source: China Packaging Network (pack.cn), original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-362204.html