A dramatic act of protest reminds companies to take responsibility for the wasteful packaging they produce.

Each morning this week I've passed a sign nailed to a telephone pole that says, "The problem with litter is YOU!" This sign irritates me because I think it's dead wrong. While people need to be respectful of their surroundings and not throw garbage away willy-nilly, they are not the problem here. They are victims of a system that is designed to fail. When almost every single thing we buy comes with excessive, non-biodegradable, or hard-to-recycle packaging, it's absurd to expect people not to generate any litter, ever.

A much better approach, as we've argued before on TreeHugger, is to target the manufacturers of the goods we buy, demanding that they take responsibility for the full life-cycle of their packaging, preferably through collection for reuse. But how does one push companies to do such a thing?

A group of school girls from the Indian city of Toothukudi in Tamil Nadu has tackled this issue in an interesting and innovative way. Prompted by city council, students at Subbiah Vidyalayam Girls Higher Secondary School collected all food wrappers that they generated during a two-week period. This amounted to 20,244 wrappers, with just over 10,000 attributed to food manufacturer Britannia and another 3,412 to wafer-maker Nabati. The girls mailed the wrappers to the companies, with the following letter: