SPEAKER_04: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
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SPEAKER_03: 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford.
SPEAKER_00: This is a Cole Porter song written in 1934. And what else might he compare the object of his affections to a summer's day?
SPEAKER_00: Of course, the latest in clear plastic food packaging. That wouldn't happen nowadays. And not just because the less mellifluous, your low density polyethylene doesn't rhyme. Plastic packaging has a bad rap. When the UK's Guardian newspaper invited readers to share examples of annoyingly unnecessary packaging, comments flooded in.
SPEAKER_01: Shrink-wrapped cucumbers. Apples in hard plastic tubes. Pre-cut melon in little pouches. Bananas
SPEAKER_00: in bags. Doesn't mother nature already provide bananas with packaging of their own? It all seems so obviously wasteful. We'll come back to that seeming obviousness, but let's start our packaging story in a more innocent age, before anyone worried about plastic in landfills, or the sea, or the food chain. It begins in 1904 at an upmarket restaurant in Vosges, France. When an elderly patron spills red wine over a pristine linen tablecloth. Sitting at a nearby table is a Swiss chemist, Jacques Brandenburger. He works for a French textile company and as he watches the waiter change the tablecloth, he finds himself wondering, could he make a fabric that would simply wipe clean? He couldn't. He tried spraying cellulose on tablecloths, but it peeled off in transparent sheets. But might those transparent sheets have a market? By the First World War he'd found one. Eye pieces for gas masks. He called his invention cellophane. And in 1923 he sold the rights to the DuPont Corporation in America. Early uses there included wrapping chocolates, perfume and flowers. Perhaps those romantic connotations inspired Cole Porter. Sales took off. The timing was perfect. In the 1930s, supermarkets were changing. Customers no longer queued to tell shop assistants what food they required. They picked products off the shelves instead. See-through packaging was a hit. A less than progressively titled article in a 1938 edition of The Progressive Grocer announced, she buys meat with her eyes. In fact, the meat counter was the hardest to make self-service. The problem was that meat once cut would quickly discolour. But trials suggested that by letting shoppers skip the queue to instruct the butcher, self-service could sell 30% more meat. And with such an incentive solutions would be found. Pink tinted lighting, antioxidant additives and of course an improved version of cellophane that let through just the right amount of oxygen. But cellophane would soon fall out of fashion. Out-competed by the likes of Dow Chemical's polyvinylidene chloride. Like cellophane, it was an accidental discovery that was first used in conflict. In this case, weatherproofing fighter planes in World War II. And like cellophane, it needed plenty of research and development before it could be used on food. It was originally dark green and smelled disgusting. Once Dow sorted that out it hit the market as Saran wrap, now more widely known as cling wrap or cling film. After health scares with polyvinylidene chloride, cling film is now often made with low density polyethylene. Although that's, well, less clingy. Low density polyethylene is also the stuff of those one-use supermarket bags that are now being banned around the world. And what's high density polyethylene I hear you ask? Well, that's what you might get milk in. Not fizzy drinks though, they come in polyethylene terephthalate. And if you're not lost already, consider that plastic packaging is increasingly made from multiple layers of these and other substances, such as biaxially oriented polypropylene or ethylene vinyl acetate. There's a reason for this, say packaging gurus. Different materials have different properties. So multiple layers can give you the same performance from a thinner and thus lighter piece of packaging. But these compound packaging materials are harder to recycle. The trade-off is hard to fathom. Depending on how much of the heavier recyclable packaging would in practice be recycled, you might find that the lighter non-recyclable packaging actually generates less trash. And once you start looking into plastic packaging, this kind of counterintuitive conclusion comes up all the time. Some packaging is a foolish waste, but are shrink-wrapped cucumbers really so silly? They stay fresh for 14 days against just three days without the wrapping. Plastic bags stop bananas going brown so quickly, or new potatoes going green. They catch grapes that fall off bunches. About a decade ago, a UK supermarket experimented with taking all its fruit and vegetables out of their packaging and their wastage rate doubled. And it's not just shelf life. There's waste en route to the shelves. Another supermarket, stung by criticism for putting apples in plastic-wrapped trays, tried selling them loose from big cardboard boxes. But so many were damaged in transit, this used more packaging per apple actually sold. According to a UK government report, only 3% of food is wasted before it gets to stores. In developing countries, that figure can be 50%. And the difference is partly due to how the food is packaged. As more of us live in cities, far from where food is grown, this matters. Even the dreaded single-use shopping bag might not be the villain it seems. If you've bought sturdy, reusable bags from your supermarket, it's likely they're made from non-woven polypropylene. And they are less damaging. But only if you use them at least 52 times. That's according to a report by the Danish government, which weighed up the varied environmental impacts of producing and disposing of different kinds of bag. The market can be a wonderful way of signalling popular desires. Shoppers in 1940s America wanted convenient, pre-cut meat. And the invisible hand delivered the technologies that made it possible. But our desire for less waste may not yield to market forces, because the issue's complicated and our choices at the checkout may accidentally do more harm than good. We can only send that message on a more circuitous route through governments and pressure groups, and hope that they, and well-meaning industry initiatives, will figure out some sensible answers. One thing is clear. The answer won't be no packaging. It'll be better packaging, dreamed up in research and development labs of the kind that gave us moisture-proof cellophane. Maybe Cole Porter was onto something after all. One of our key sources was a Harvard Business School working paper, Cellophane,
SPEAKER_03: the New Visuality and the Creation of Self-Service Food Retailing. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50things.
SPEAKER_00: 30 animals, wherever you find your podcasts.
