Easter Eggstravaganza 

Easter eggs might not be getting any smaller, but you could be forgiven for thinking so: their packaging seems to be expanding faster than our waistlines.

It’s March, and after a couple of months’ hard work at the gym you’ve got shot of the Christmas flab, just in time for the next influx of chocolaty excess: Easter.

Of course, there’s much more to both Christmas and Easter than simply eating shed-loads of chocolate, but, if you do, you may have noticed that it’s not just you that’s being over-indulgent.

Our experiments with making our own Easter egg showed how fragile they can be, so we realise that a thin-walled chocolate egg needs a bit of protection as it travels from Mrs Cadbury’s Parrot to the table, but so do hens’ eggs, and a simple cardboard box is good enough for them.

To prove our point, we decided to buy a sample of this season’s eggs and compare the packaging used for each - it’s a hard job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Egads!

First off, we started with a few big-brand favourites. This year’s Crunchie egg comes in a medium-sized card box, with a cut-out window in the front panel, and costs around £3. Inside, a hollow egg and two standard Crunchie bars are protected by a PVC insert. Although it’s open at the back, reducing the protection but saving plastic, the egg and bars were in perfect condition. Click on the image for a larger version.

For the same price we also bought a Smarties egg, which comes with two Smarties tubes and this year celebrates the blue Smartie’s triumphant return. Interestingly, although it’s made by Nestle, it comes in very similar packaging to Cadbury’s Crunchie egg. The insert is made of the less-than-delicious-sounding polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Although it does protect the chocolates from both sides, there’s rather a lot of it.

The box containing the Mars & Friends egg, which comes “with a selection of your favourite treats!” is cavernous by comparison. There’s a cute Easter bunny (see above) on the outside, keen to inform us that he’s printed onto recycled card. Like the Crunchie, the box contains chocolate protected by a PET liner, but it seems much larger than it needs to be - the box might stand out on the shelves, but there’s a lot of plastic and wasted space inside. The egg cost £5.

I should cocoa

With a few big-name examples explored, we wanted to see what alternatives there were. Green & Blacks have grown into a pretty big brand these days, but their Maya Gold chocolate was the first product sold under a Fairtrade mark in the UK, and this year Oxfam is selling a Maya Gold egg for £3.49. Although the egg itself isn’t much smaller than the more mainstream brands, it’s in a much smaller box. It’s in a thinner plastic liner, too, but although the box says that the plastic is recyclable, it doesn’t say exactly what it is, so it might prove extra tricky.

For £4.99, Oxfam’s also selling Fairtrade eggs by Divine, a company co-owned by the Ghanaian cocoa growers’ co-operative Kuapa Kokoo. The milk chocolate egg looks every bit as special as the others, but there’s a big difference - no hard-to-recycle plastic liner. There’s a nice set of mini eggs with it but, alas, they come in a thick plastic bag.

Divine’s second egg is probably the best example of the lot. It’s aimed at kids, and comes with a Dubble chocolate & crisped rice bar. Again, there’s no plastic sleeve, in fact there’s just one thin plastic wrap on the bar itself. It’s a great example of keeping packaging at a minimum, and making it as recyclable as possible. Even better, the Fairtrade egg is produced in association with Comic Relief, which provided funds to help Kuapa get started back in 1993. It’s available at Oxfam for £2.99.

Egged on

If you can’t make it to an Oxfam shop but you don’t want to find yourself lumbered with profligate packaging, there are some mainstream buys that keep waste to a minimum. Mini Eggs belong to the “little and often” school of chocolate treats - a good plan if you’re making any car journeys with the kids over the Easter weekend. Although they’re packed in a plastic bag, it’s smaller than the liner used for hollow eggs so there’s less to throw away if you can’t find a place to recycle it.

Best of all, perhaps, are medium-sized products such as Creme Eggs and Mars Eggs, both of which come wrapped only in aluminium foil. Not every recycling service will process this, but it’s generally easier to re-use or recycle than plastic, and each egg comes in a minimal amount.

See all our Easter egg photos on Flickr

HEADER IMAGE by Flickr user Adobemac

Posted by Simon on 19 March 08