Heads or tails

… Or that is, the changing world of packaging

«But who are you? Are you my mother, my sister, the earth or the moon? Who are you?» says Marcello Mastroianni to Anita Ekberg in the film La dolce vita by Fellini. And I ask myself the same question as I think of two events that, as if in a bizarre kaleidoscope, I have experienced over just a few days: the conference at the Caritas Ambrosiana Refectory, Milan, where packaging was spoken of in detail along with the fight against domestic food waste, and Luxe Pack, the “glamour” fair par excellence, where I saw the same essential protective cladding become a luxury garment, ennobled by evermore incredible and complex colors and finishes, laden with seductive as well as service functions, almost to the point of making it an icon of the superfluous.

“Packaging what are you? How many faces do you have? “Are you” Pietro Attoma, vicepresident of Comieco, dressed in regulation blue, who speaks composedly of the role of packaging in terms of protection of products and information to minimize the amount of food that systematically gets thrown into the bin?
Or “are you” Nathalie Grosdidier, head of Luxe Pack Monaco, who, in her beautiful white dress with black spots, strolling from stand to stand and understandably satisfied with the run of the 2015 edition, acts as a mirror to the sophisticated forms to the new bottles for selective perfumery, to the thousand embossed and relief finishings of cosmetics cases and boxes, to the materic sleeves for Spumante and spirits bottles, in line with the latest fashion.

Evidently the subject is still packaging and over and beyond the manifest differences the examples refer to, points of contact are not lacking.
In Milano, Luciano Gualzetti of Caritas Ambrosiana told everyone how the Refectory, built out of the former theatre of the parish of San Martino, came into being through a partnership with Massimo Bottura, the multistar chef, and thanks to the donations of companies and artists, with the objective of turning the food surplus of Expo (by October 15 tons of food) into tasty meals for those hosted by the institution - «people that our economic system consider as rejects or waste» and that need to be helped back to being independent. A project hence for “recovering food, but also to feed and nourish the soul, to generate energy for life”.

At Monaco, alongside the frivolities of the realm of appearance, of the illusions of “I would If I could - even though I can’t” that titillate people’s dreams and know no crisis, there is also a lot of attention to sustainability of companies and products, that slowly but beyond all chatter, are becoming evermore concrete.

Examples that are still niche but not for that without value, and not only symbolic value at that: from the special papers made using processing offcuts, to grape skins from winemaking to scraps of leather, to the multidose packs in flexible material for beauty products that are even reclosable, and the refills for creams that seem to contradict the exclusivity promised by the contents. But the material, the packaging, cannot be simplified, this on both fronts. Worthy of note in fact, on the one hand agreements signed by IMA and with the FAO, that covers an investment of 450 thousand euros in three years for developing new technologies for the production and packaging of food products in Subsaharian countries; on the other the fight against product counterfeiting (fake luxury products, but also medicinal products that first and foremost damage the consumer) with innovatory solutions, like those conceived by Arjo Wiggins Security and adopted by Cosmografica Albertini, capable of reading the fibre of the board used to make, in any point you wish, and to combine the data with the relative lot number.
That is to say, there is truth in the Chinese proverb: “When you only have two cents, buy a loaf of bread with one and a lily with the other”.