China Consumers Association's "Research on Excessive Packaging of Commodities and Consumer Perception Survey Report" shows that among the surveyed consumers, 95.4% of consumers have their own experience in judging excessively packaged products. The way for consumers to judge the highest rate of excessive packaging usage is to see whether it is "deceptive packaging" or "luxury packaging". Among the respondents, only 34.0% of consumers think they understand the correct definition of excessive packaging, and only 7.8% of consumers are familiar with the criteria for judging excessive packaging. The survey shows that the methods and requirements for judging the excessive packaging of goods by consumers themselves are inconsistent with the national standards, and misjudgments are prone to occur. To further strengthen the governance of excessive packaging of commodities, it is necessary to improve the standards of commodity packaging.
According to the survey conducted by China Consumers Association, there are many ways for consumers to judge whether they belong to excessive packaging, but most of them are perceptual knowledge. Among the multiple-choice questions, 58.5% of consumers choose "whether there is packaging fraud", 55.6% Consumers judge whether a product belongs to excessive packaging from the "luxury degree of packaging"; on the contrary, consumers use the lowest proportion of quantitative indicators for judging by the packaging void ratio and the number of packaging layers similar to the national standard.
From the perspective of the difficulty of popularizing official criteria, ordinary consumers can judge whether a product belongs to excessive packaging according to the number of packaging layers, but this method is only suitable for judging products with excessive packaging layers, which has limitations; judging excessive packaging through the packaging void ratio The method is too professional for ordinary consumers; the method of judging excessive packaging by the proportion of packaging cost is not feasible due to the lack of cost data. Specifically reflected in:
1. Consumers are more sensitive to the number of layers of packaging. 62.0% of consumers judged that the subjective standard for the number of packaging layers of excessive packaging was stricter than the national standard (except for grain and its processed products, moon cakes and rice dumplings, other foods and cosmetics should not exceed four layers), and most consumers believed that more than four layers Three layers are excessive packaging.
2. The void ratio of packaging varies greatly with the weight/volume reference value of a single product, which is difficult for ordinary consumers to quantify. There is a large gap between the subjective standard of packaging void ratio for consumers to judge excessive packaging and the national standard for packaging void ratio. According to the national standard GB23350-2021 4.1 Table 1 on the porosity of food and cosmetics packaging , as the weight/volume of a single product decreases, the allowable value of the porosity of the product also increases significantly, for example, when the net content of a single product is greater than 15 ml/g And when it is less than or equal to 30ml/g, the allowable value of the void ratio of the package shall not exceed 50%; but if consumers do not know that the allowable value of the void ratio can increase significantly as the weight/volume of a single product decreases, when the actual product exceeds 40% % void ratio, 60.8% of consumers think that the product is over-packaged, but the product does not actually exceed the standard requirements.
In response to the above problems, the China Consumers Association suggests: First, through consumer education, popularize the correct definition, identification indicators, index allowable values and methods suitable for consumers to identify excessive packaging, so that consumers know the limitations and errors of their own identification of excessive packaging Second, the existing standards refer to consumers' common sense and existing ability to identify and recognize, improve and improve in stages, and strive to promote the consistency between the standards and consumers' perception of excessively packaged products and the actual results; third, It is recommended that commodity manufacturers mark the number of packaging layers, packaging void ratio, packaging materials and other indicators on commodity packaging, so that consumers can clearly choose to consume.
