Cellophane

50 Things That Made the Modern Economy

BBC

Business

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2019

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Plastic food packaging often seems obviously wasteful. But when Jacques Brandenberger invented cellophane, consumers loved it. It helped supermarkets go self-service, and it was so popular Cole Porter put it in a song lyric. Nowadays, people worry that plastic doesn’t get recycled enough but there are two sides to this story. Plastic packaging can protect food from being damaged in transit, and help it stay fresh for longer. Should we care more about plastic waste or food waste? As Tim Harford explains, it isn’t obvious and the issue is complicated enough that our choices at the checkout may accidentally do more harm than good. Producer: Ben Crighton Editor: Richard Vadon (Image: Noodles and cellophane, Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a cold port song written in 1934.
0:24.2	On what else might you compare the object of his affections to a summer's day?
0:32.6	Cellophane?
0:35.6	Of course, the latest in clear plastic food packaging.
0:40.7	That wouldn't happen nowadays.
0:42.4	And not just because the Les Malifluous, your low-density polyethylene, doesn't rhyme.
0:48.7	Plastic packaging has a bad rap.
0:51.8	In the UK's Guardian newspaper, invited readers to share examples of annoyingly unnecessary
0:57.6	packaging, comments flooded in.
1:01.7	Shrink-wrapped cucumbers.
1:03.4	Apples in hard plastic tubes.
1:05.7	Pre-cut melon in little pouches.
1:08.6	Bananas in bags.
1:10.7	Doesn't Mother Nature already provide bananas with packaging of their own?
1:15.9	It all seems so obviously wasteful.
1:19.2	We'll come back to that seeming obvious.
1:22.2	But let's start our packaging story in a more innocent age.
1:27.4	Before anyone worried about plastic in landfills, or the sea, or the food chain.
1:37.6	It begins in 1904 at an upmarket restaurant in Vosge, France.
1:45.1	Then an elderly patron spills red wine over a pristine linen tablecloth.
1:52.2	Sitting at a nearby table is a Swiss chemist, Jacques Brandenberger.
1:59.3	He works for a French textile company, and as he watches the waiter change the tablecloth,
	...

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