During comprehensive research of packaging attributes, the author found that there are a number of consumers who reuse packaging for other uses. There is no previous research that investigates these types of packaging attributes, which is a vital step to identify some of the attributes of reusable packaging. This step desires to identify reusable packaging attributes and avoid the confusion of reusable packaging attributes for main purposes or for secondary purposes. This step intends to highlight the real case of reuse behaviour with product packaging and to understand the attributes that convince consumers to reuse product packaging. The research will pick the participants’ experiences carefully and analyse them to identify reusable packaging attributes. There are many different kinds of packaging that have been recognised for reuse for other purposes in people’s lifestyles. A qualitative study was conducted by another questionnaire, which consisted of three questions: product packaging name, what the packaging was reused for and why this packaging was reused, and, finally, the questionnaire asked respondents to attach photographs of reusable packaging, as appended in Appendices III and IV. The questionnaire does not keep specific packaging types; rather, it gives open choices for answers to questions with any type of packaging that the respondents reused. This questionnaire was designed to be deployed over the Internet. All textual data that come from participants are in electronic form. This questionnaire allowed participants to enter two types of product packaging that they reuse and also allowed participants to repeat the questionnaire if they had packaging from more than two products by clicking on the questionnaire link again. The questionnaire was piloted with three participants and then refined before the questionnaire link was diffused through various modern ways during the time period of July 2013 and August 2013.
Thus, the questionnaire link was sent to volunteers by various modern ways. The ways that the author distributed the questionnaires were posting on social networks like
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Facebook, Twitter and advertising on some websites. In turn, those participants were asked to forward the questionnaire link to other people. The questionnaire strategy used a snowball sampling concept, ‘who-knows-who’, which asks participants who else should be participating (Malhotra and Birks 2006). In order to assess the presence of non-response bias, the assumption is that respondents who have the same types of answer were excluded for analysis as it is not going to add any value; however, they are accounted in as the number of participants in order to find out the rate of response. The recent contemporary experimental methods used the image as a part of study was Langley et al.’s (2011) study, which used questionnaires in order to identify product packaging that falls into the various categories but the study included some product images under various dimensions for testing consumers’ behaviour towards various packaging. The questionnaire in the current study has the advantage of not focusing participants’ attention on a specific area of social behaviour. The results from participants are closer to individuals’ real behaviour, which makes the objectivity of participants and interpretation of results more valuable and avoids people’s imagination. The imagination behaviours come from some questionnaires which direct participants’ intention as opposed to their real behaviour. Questionnaires were sent to 250 households, of which 100 returned the questionnaire; however, only 50 of these were fully completed – the others were rejected. The response rate was 20%. The participants received a plain language statement, which explained the research aim and objectives, with the questionnaire link. The plain language statement is provided in Appendix IV and V. The reusable packaging photographed by participants was of 25 types and each one was given a descriptive name, a brief description of features that have to be reusable, and an image of packaging which will be easy to identify during further investigation. The 25 kinds of packaging reused for secondary uses are outlined in Appendix VI.
5.5.1 Refining secondary packaging reuse
In order to make the test manageable, it is important to reduce the amount of packaging mentioned in the questionnaire to conform to a reasonable timescale. In the Lofthouse et al. study (2009) about refillable packaging, there was some refillable packaging that was rejected for further investigation because it was inconvenient for consumers and business or did not fit into the business model. Therefore, the research discounted those types of packaging that have the same functions. Table 5-8 provides a summary of
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packaging which has been considered as one type for further analysis and reasons for this consideration.
Table 5-8: Reusable packaging rejected for further analysis
Type Packaging name Reason for consideration as one packaging
example
Glass
Olive bottle, Honey pot, Yogurt bottle, Jam bottle, Apricot Jam, Cheese bottle and Gram bottle
All these types of bottle packaging are considered as one example because they have the same function to re-store items in glass packaging.
Carton
Indonesian noodles box, Mobile box, Toy gift box, Pure DKNY perfume box, Sony Ericsson phone box, Delivery box, Clarks shoe box, Cotton buds and Guess Wristlet bag box
All these types of box packaging are considered as one example because they have the same function to re-store items in carton packaging.
Plastic
Sony Ericsson phone box, Olay Creams and Coffee whitener
All these types of packaging are considered as one example because they have the same function to re-store items in plastic packaging.
Steel Quality Street box, Baby milk box
These two box packaging items are considered as one example because they have the same function to re-store items in steel packaging
The reusable packaging, on which the research will concentrate, comprises glass, steel, plastic and carton packaging. These classifications of packaging were used to facilitate further investigation. For understanding a person’s reason behind their reuse of packaging, the particular question of why they reused this packaging for other purposes is essential. All the answers provided are shown in Table 5-9 and the research has excluded repeated answers.
Table 5-9: Positive attitudes towards reuse of packaging