Some people feel that manufacturers and supermarkets have the responsibility to reduce the amount of packaging of goods. Others argue that customers should avoid buying goods with a lot of packaging. Discuss both views and give your opinion.

The amount of packaging of foods is a topic that has been getting increasing attention over the past few years. While most agree that something has to be done in order to reduce the number of packages used, the best way to achieve

this

is still controversial. On one hand, some people think that the manufacturers and supermarkets should decrease the packaging of the goods they sell, but

on the other hand

, some are convinced that the initiative has to come from the customers, who should avoid buying

such

products. The idea that a top-down approach should be adopted, with the highly packaged items not being able to reach the supermarket shelves in the

first

place has a lot of merits since

this

would remove these goods from commercialization and, in turn, be a surefire way of diminishing packaging usage.

However

, the implementation of

this

strategy is not so straightforward and would demand an articulation from the government to approve laws that forced the companies to reduce the amount of food packaging. Meanwhile, a change in consumer culture doesn't require any initiative by part of the politicians and if the customers stop purchasing items with a lot of packaging, there'll be a natural pressure for the stores to stop selling

such

products and, as a consequence, the manufacturers would have no incentive to keep producing them.

Therefore

,

although

in theory, a decrease in package usage headed by the supermarkets and producers would lead to a faster outcome, in practice it would be really hard to implement

this

and, as

such

, to tackle the packaging problem from a consumer point of view would be a more realistic approach to solve it.