Image source: https://www.cookinglight.com/cooking-101/ways-to-use-bottom-nutella-jar

I am sure we all know the irritating feeling of having food right in front of us and not being able to eat it, and then having to throw it away. 

But, let me be more specific—you are famished and holding a nearly empty tub of Nutella. Your spoon is just enough to reach the bottom, and the container is too small for your big hands to really have any autonomy over it. The more you scrape, the harder it becomes to fill your spoon. You enjoy any little bit you can manage to get on the tip of your silverware, but you know you will soon have nothing. And then it happens. In the midst of the adrenaline and hopefulness you had of having a fulfilling snack after a long day of work, you accept that you have lost the battle to the Nutella container and can’t get any more onto your spoon. As you lick the messy fingers of one hand, the other hand throws away a jar cumulatively containing at least a whole delicious spoonful of hazelnut spread into the garbage. A tragedy to your taste buds, but there is nothing else you could have done.

If containers like those of Nutella jars had been designed differently, maybe you would not have been left in sorrow wondering if you should have tried harder. Not only can it be a tough play on our emotions, inefficient food packaging is a considerable source of food waste. Nutella is not the only brand guilty of forcing us to waste food—peanut butter, condiments like ketchup and mayonnaise bottles, salsa jars, glass bottles of thick sauces like teriyaki, and even yogurt cups all leave behind dirty containers that often end up either down the sink or in a landfill. 

If you were to add up all the ketchup you’ve thrown away during you whole like from “empty” bottles, how many new bottles could you fill? One? Five? Food waste in landfills is a significant producer of methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than the infamous carbon dioxide.

Not all packaging favours food waste like the examples above. Yogurt tubes, freezies, and bagged milk allow you to perfectly squeeze out all the contents, popsicles can be sucked until only a compostable wooden stick is left, and butter wrappers perfectly peel off the block when it is cold enough. Trying to decide between a tasty treat and being conscientious of the environment can often require making sacrifices; without our continuous awareness of climate change, however, we might not be around for too long to be able to make these decisions.

It’d just be nice if they made tubed Nutella.