Does excessive packaging affect your purchasing decisions?

Yeo Valley Organic
claims to have saved 109 tonnes of unnecessary packaging from its products in the 12months from January 2008. They have reduced the amount of plastic used in their pots, increased the amount of packaging which is made from recycled material and removed all avoidable cardboard sleeves. Read more.

I have recently bought the Waitrose organic natural live bio yoghurt which does have a removable cardboard sleeve which is recyclable and the pot and lid are stated as recyclable too. This is certainly a move in the right direction, for people like me who are obsessed with reducing waste, particularly waste that gets sent to land-fill. According to online industry magazine DairyReporter.Com a spokesperson for the group suggests that the future of its ongoing green commitments may lie beyond pack reductions, particularly in development of compostable alternatives.

Do excessive packaging, recyclability or compostability affect your purchasing decisions?

At last an eco tip that saves effort too!

Here's the kind of handy hint I like. Reading the Homeserve customer magazine I came across this:

"Don't spend ages washing paint brushes if you're going to be using them again tomorrow. Just wrap them tightly in clingfilm so they don't dry out and carry on with the job the next day."

Well, I wouldn't use clingfilm personally, as I feel that is using new resources needlessly. But a bit of plastic film packaging that, hard as I try, I don't seem to be able to avoid, did the trick perfectly well, even though it was quite the next day that I went back to the painting. As I paint today with my unwashed brushes I think of all that water and energy (I mean my own) that I've saved. So what am I doing writing this, when I should be getting on with the decorating? Well, you know what they say about watching paint dry....