Packaging: Over the Top?

If you listen to the protests and complaints of environmentalists and other green anti-packaging materials people, you would think that retailers are pointlessly covering their products with excessive and unnecessary packaging, frustrating recycling efforts, and clogging landfills with non-biodegradable plastics and other foul materials. Is packaging such a frivolous luxury, or is it a necessary part of delivering the product? Few would disagree that contemporary standards deliver safe food products to consumers, unspoiled and free from the toxins that plagued previous generations of consumers. To what extent, then, has packaging become excessive?

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