The citizens of Lincolnshire, England, were so fed up with the layers of plastic and cardboard and Styrofoam that encased their store purchases this fall that they took a high-priced, highly wrapped piece of meat to court.

Specifically, the Lincolnshire County Council sued the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain for “excessive packaging” of its Taste the Difference Slow Matured Ultimate Beef Roasting Joint, which costs nearly $9 per pound, after receiving consumer complaints. No matter that the meat was a “luxury” item, the council said: the way it was packaged — plastic-wrapped atop a PET tray under a clear plastic cover and then swathed in a fetching cardboard sleeve — violated British law.

British regulations on excess packaging first took effect in 2003 in an effort to reduce waste, particularly items that cannot be recycled and go into a landfill. Those rules, strengthened two years ago in response to environmental concerns and an awareness that the nation’s landfills were reaching their limits, now require that producers keep packaging to the minimum required for “products’ safety, hygiene and consumer acceptance.”

That set off a nationwide experiment in rethinking how familiar products are sold, from Easter eggs to tubes of tomato paste to plastic jugs of fabric softener.