Product and Packaging Disposal’s Challenges to Channels Management

Abstract

As marketers have responded to society’s growing desire for more convenient, and more disposable, products, it has become clearer that marketers have insufficiently planned and anticipated the consequences of convenient, disposable products and packages. Even with such reminders of post-purchase use and disposal of products as Alderson’s comprehensive marketing theory of the 1950s and then the attention to waste disposal and recycling of the 1970s and ’80s, it is debatable whether sufficient attention is given to planning and implementing distribution systems which embrace the recollecting, recycling, and reuse of products and packaging. Giving the matter appropriate attention will be a challenging educational and retraining process, but it is a commitment which channels managers will be required to make.