As we celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival, numerous ads for fancy mooncakes start to fill our social media timelines, malls, and almost everywhere you look. Traditional mooncakes of the yesteryears were focused on the flavours and came in simple boxes, but these days, gifting mooncakes seems more about the fancy packaging than the contents.
However, this indulgence comes at a high environmental cost. About half of the packaging is wasteful – besides the presentation box, there’s also the plastic and paper used for inner packaging. The production and carbon footprint of these fancy containers uses up significant resources, and worse, after the contents are devoured, most of these containers simply end up in the bin no matter how reusable they seem to be.
Cat is out of the box
These days, it seems like even if you want to buy a mooncake because it’s unique (say, like Maoshanwang XO Cognac Valrhona Macadamia Snowskin or anything else you can imagine), it’s almost impossible to buy it without first buying the entire fancy packaging.
And the competition among brands to outdo each other has led to increasingly elaborate designs.
Most people are more than willing to buy and gift elaborately-packaged mooncakes – some of these can cost upwards of $200! Unsurprisingly, most of what you pay for is not for the mooncake itself. According to an industry insider, a mooncake costs less than a dollar to bake, and the packaging is under $20. Most hotels charge upwards of $60 to customers, justifying it by claiming they’re “crafted by chefs” even when they’re outsourced to a factory:
Of course, part of the outrageous pricing is due to all that marketing – the photography of these mooncakes alone is enough to make you crave them.
Many of these cardboard gift boxes may look fancy, but they’re not doing anything for the environment because they’re difficult to recycle. Unless you can peel off the laminate from the cardboard before tossing them into the recycling bin, they’re destined for the incinerator.
So retailers have gotten on the bandwagon about sustainability, and are producing packaging meant to be reused long after they’ve served their original purpose.
The argument for reusing the packaging
These days, you’ll find more and more mooncake packaging that claim to be made “sustainably” or are eco-friendly because they’re reusable. Indeed, you can find mooncakes in lacquered wooden boxes, leatherette handbags, metal tiffin carriers, mirrored jewelry boxes, Bluetooth speakers, and more. All of these no doubt encourage consumers to keep them long after the mooncakes are gone, but most of the time, they’re not exactly built to last.
Of course, these fancy “reusable” mooncake boxes benefit the hotels who sell them because it’s a form of free advertisement when consumers keep them in their homes. And many consumers actually do keep some of their favourite boxes long after the festival is over. But since Mid-Autumn is an annual event, how many of these fancy packages can we keep, as our homes keep getting smaller and smaller?
Is there a solution to this?
In order to keep wastage to a minimum, there has to be a way to keep both retailers and consumers happy. First off, packaging contributes to most of the cost of making a mooncake, so the solution is to minimise it. For this to work, it’ll require the cooperation of both consumer and retailer.
A popular suggestion is to give consumers the choice of whether or not they want to have their mooncakes in a fancy package. If they’re buying for themselves, maybe they won’t need to splurge. If they’re gifting the mooncakes, then give them the option of paying a premium for the packaging. It seems to be a win-win situation:
Another way to cut down on buying fancy mooncakes is to get those traditional ones you find at your very local (read: shophouse) bakeries. These include items like Hainanese Salt & Pepper Mooncakes to Hokkien Scholar Mooncakes, which are getting increasingly hard to find.
Of course, we’ll still buy mooncakes in fancy packaging – the simple reason is that if it’s for gifting, you don’t want tongues wagging about being cheap or insincere! Also, as things are getting more and more expensive in Singapore, buying an atas mooncake is one form of luxury we can actually afford since it comes only once a year.
As we celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, it’s important to consider the environmental impact of mooncake packaging. Elaborate wrapping often leads to unnecessary waste that harms the planet. By choosing sustainable options, both consumers and retailers can help reduce waste.
