n Rwanda, plastic bags have been banned for years. It’s not that you have to pay for them in the super. It is that there is not directly. When one arrives at the airport in Kigali, the capital, the first thing they do in the security control is to open the suitcase to check that there are no bags inside and if they find any, they requisition it. In Spain we are still light years away from living without plastics, although the most involved sectors (distribution and logistics) are taking steps to reduce their use. In our daily consumption is part of the problem: shopping bags, which we use to weigh fruit and vegetables, garbage … “25% of household waste are packaging and 70% of them are of food products, “says Daniel de la Torre, manager of UNO, the logistics and transport employers.
The problem, the experts point out, is the so-called packaging: the plastic or cardboard that surrounds the products that we buy and that serves to protect our purchases when we order them online and bring them home. “The challenge is to eliminate packaging that does not provide any added value in transportation or sale and leave the one that is put to protect,” says De la Torre. Can, for example, Amazon eliminate packaging on the products it ships? “It is very difficult to replace it, but it can be reduced to the strictly necessary to protect the product,” he says. Avoid, reduce and reuse. That will be the future. «The biggest waste is in reverse logistics: when the customer receives the product and returns it. There are people who buy two sizes and then return the one that does not fit, “says the manager of UNO. The solution to that, he says, could be to generalize the box office in stores (which some chains like Inditex already have) so that the consumer can pick up the product directly, without packaging.
