Shanghai Moves to Trim Over-Packaging: Draft Rules Head to July Deliberation

Tightening the rules at both the manufacturing and the distribution ends could soon make it far harder for over-packaged goods to reach consumers at all. Shanghai is turning to legislation to slim down product packaging — a shift the industry is watching with genuine anticipation. The draft, titled the Provisions of Shanghai Municipality on Promoting the Reduction of Commodity Packaging (Draft for Public Comment), spans 12 areas, from legislative purpose, scope of application and basic principles to the division of responsibilities and packaging requirements, and is scheduled to reach the Standing Committee of the Shanghai Municipal People's Congress for deliberation in July.

Shaped by repeated field investigations and feedback gathered from many quarters, the draft takes a “firm yet flexible” approach, aiming to fold every link — production, sales, consumption and supervision — into the effort to constrain excessive packaging.

The scene is familiar to almost everyone: a purchase arrives wrapped in layer upon layer of outer packaging, and once all of it is peeled away, what is inside turns out to be disappointingly small or plainly not worth the price. By the time buyers realise they have been taken in, the item is already in their hands, so they write it off as bad luck and vow never to buy it again. Those stacks of wrapping are what experts call excessive packaging: too much material, too much weight, too much bulk, too high a cost, decoration that is overdone and marketing copy that overpromises.

The damage caused by over-packaging is usually summed up in four counts: it wastes resources, pollutes the environment, drives up product costs and hurts consumers' interests, and it feeds wasteful habits, breeds corruption and coarsens the social climate. It clashes with the Chinese tradition of valuing simplicity and thrift, and runs against the goals of building a resource-saving, environment-friendly society and advancing socialist spiritual civilisation. That is precisely why Shanghai's legislative push deserves attention.

National rules are already in place, of course. On March 28, 2010, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine and the Standardization Administration of China issued the national standard Requirements for Restricting Excessive Packaging of Commodities — Foods and Cosmetics, which came into force on April 1 that same year. Its reach, however, stops at food and cosmetics. Shanghai's proposed legislation widens the commodity coverage and applies controls across production, sales, consumption and supervision at once, which should tackle both symptoms and root causes.

Take the purchasing stage. Under the draft, a retailer signing a supply contract with a manufacturer would have to spell out packaging requirements, and when accepting delivery could ask the manufacturer for a packaging test report; if the manufacturer refuses to supply one, the retailer would be entitled to reject the goods. Using the contract as a checkpoint keeps over-packaged products out of the market and puts source-level control into practice.

With both the production end and the distribution end held to account, over-packaged goods should struggle to do consumers any harm.

Where no national standard yet governs excessive packaging, the draft proposes pairing obligations with incentives — encouraging companies to cut packaging on their own while stressing industry self-discipline and public oversight. Guiding clauses would urge producers and sellers to disclose information such as packaging recovery and packaging costs on outer packaging; trade associations could draw up self-regulatory rules and, under the guidance of relevant government departments, run certification for simplified commodity packaging; and consumers who spot packaging that breaches mandatory rules could report it to the quality supervision authorities.

A draft, though, remains a draft. The first hurdle is whether it passes at all; even if it does, strengthening enforcement is the same old challenge. Still, having laws to rely on beats having none, and uneven enforcement beats no enforcement. Given that Shanghai has committed to legislating against excessive packaging, it is unlikely to let the draft become a dead letter and undercut itself. In that sense, the city's legislative experiment is genuinely grounds for optimism.

— Reposted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-362064.html