While packaging-free stores are in the uptake, single-use packaging remains a constitutive element in self-service supermarkets. Portraying packaging as an actor in workplace practices, the article provides novel explanations for the supermarkets’ struggle to reduce packaging. The ethnographic analysis shows that food packaging is crucial for the functioning of supermarkets. This is in contrast to engineering or marketing perspectives on packaging functions that often don’t take practical demands and habitual peculiarities of everyday work practices into consideration. Framed as a code of practice, packaging guides the daily management of food in three crucial ways. First, packaging is a multifunctional medium to present products to customers. Second, packaging is an indicator and transmitter to assess product quantities and qualities in the internal logistics of supermarkets. Third, packaging enables the management and reproduction of representative supermarket qualities like freshness and fullness. As a consequence, and in order to be successful, strategies for the reduction of packaging waste have to better acknowledge the diversity of roles packaging is playing within the framework of workplace practices. Planners of innovation processes need to consider the expertise of workers, the agency of packaging, the situational distribution of action, and the cultural framings of supermarkets.
This article presents practice-theoretical conceptions of societal relations to nature as a fruitful alternative to common system approaches in social-ecological research. Via the example of plastic food packaging, two different practice-theoretical approaches to food supply are discussed regarding their suitability for relating the material properties of packaging to their everyday use by producers, retailers, and consumers: (1) the network approach (portraying food supply as a network of practices; these practices include material elements that interrelate with other elements like competence or meaning) and (2) the nexus approach (investigating the interrelation between social practices and material arrangements in which they take place). Depending on the given research interest, both perspectives have their pros and cons: the network approach is stronger in understanding the everyday use of technologies, while the nexus approach encourages the integration of infrastructures and environmental contexts that are not directly observable within the practice.
Meeresmüll und Mikroplastik sind allgegenwärtig und in aller Munde, gleichzeitig bleibt Verpackung in vielfacher Hinsicht unsichtbar und schweigsam. Ein nachhaltiger Umgang mit Verpackung muss diese in ihren Inhaltsstoffen und Umweltauswirkungen durchschaubar und damit diskutierbar machen.
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