More than anything, one of the things I have come to understand is that there is just a huge amount of waste in consumerism from a packaging perspective.  The site Treehugger does a fantastic job of consistently pushing this on its readers (examples:A Year Of Trash Is…96 Cubic Feet of Packaging and Secondary Packaging – The Silent Killer of the Environment), and some of their most interesting posts are about how to resue packaging to create new products.

Well, apparenntyl the people from Treehugger and myself are not alone, and some members of the Shanghai government have presented a bill to reduce "over" packaging by 60%:

Zhou Xingzeng, an SPC deputy from the Nanhui District, presented a bill, supported by 12 other deputies, to the plenary session of the SPC yesterday.

"Excessive packaging is a huge waste of natural resources and causes environmental pollution," Zhou said.

Luxurious packaging materials were extensively used to wrap up ordinary products, such as moon cakes, tea, tonics, wine and even books, he said in his bill.

Now, while I would say that he is limiting his scope a bit too much, what I like about this is that someone is bringing the topic up.  Perhaps it is all about timing, but I would like to think that there is a bit of maturity occurring here as they are pointing out the waste and pollution component of the equation

Of course, in the end, this will be one of those things so subjective that it will be difficult to enforce.  It was just the other day that some of my staff from Hands On were at Starbucks when we asked ourselves if the umbrella condoms they force you to wrap up umbrellas with would be subject to the plastic bag ban.  In my mind those things are much more wasteful than the plastic bags that fruit stands use.