ABSTRACT
Once you become aware of it, you seem to see packaging re-use everywhere you look. Garden trees with yoghurt pots hung from their branches as bird feeders; a plastic carrier bag re-used as a hat; allotment gardeners using drinks bottles to protect plants; your workmate’s lunchbox that was a takeaway container. Although the subject may have a tinge of ‘waste not want not’ frugality and an anti-consumerist flavour, its sheer ubiquity in response to consumerism, and the fact that it is dependent on the modern scale of consumption for its raw material, suggests that what motivates it – how it fits with people’s lives and their relationships with the material world in general – is more complex than it might seem. This is not something that only radical environmentalists do. Packaging is raw material for any further use that human creativity can identify, and this includes the most technical uses – it may be that only a small number of people will want to re-use a tin can as part of a computer wireless network antenna, but it is possible to do so (Rehm, 2007).
