Failing Chesterton’s Fence

Before you decide to get rid of something it pays to work out why it exists in the first place. Only if we can say that the original reason and cause no longer exists would it then be sensible to abolish the whatever it is.

This is not a tough piece of logic.

René Heiden pulls two glass yoghurt jars off the shop shelf, and lists the nearby supermarkets in which they can be returned once empty.

His Berlin grocery shop avoids single-use packaging in favour of reusable containers, a waste reduction model that is having something of a revival in Germany. But it’s surprisingly hard to get right.

Experiment away, of course. For that’s what a free market economy is, a constant merrygoround of experimentation. Technologies change, desires change, what’s the best meet of the two?

But it is still true that all too few stop to think about why we adopted the packaging we did adopt. Why? Because other ways wasted more of the thing being packaged. And the thing being packaged was and possibly is more valuable than the packaging. So, saving resources by economising on packaging could in fact waste more resources.

As we say, experiment away, that’s the only way we’ll all find out. But forcing people to use less packaging really might not be wise. Might, in fact, waste not save resources. For why did our forbears start using packaging in the first place?

Tim Worstall