Many years ago, during my time as a foreign student, I would return during the longer school vacations to visit my family on the East Coast of the United States.

Although it was so familiar to me, it was as though my eyes were seeing for the first time the peculiarities of suburban middle-class life in the United States each time I returned to the small middle-class town I was raised in.

For one thing, people didn't walk anywhere. You might be headed for a shop less than a kilometer away, yet whether it was summer or winter, rain or shine, you went by car.

Even more surprising during those visits though, returning as I was from lengthy stays in a country famous for rationality and thrift, were the trash days.

Towns and cities in the US provide a weekly trash pickup service for residents, with each neighborhood having its own trash day. On the day in question, a neighborhood's sidewalks would be lined with seemingly absurd amounts of refuse - large plastic overstuffed trash bags, piles of newspapers, plastic bottles and containers, boxes festooned with shiny advertising.

Each trash day anew, I was dumbstruck that single families could amass such sprawling mini-mountains of refuse in a mere week, and that they would do it again the next week and the next and the one after that.

The US has changed a lot since those days, having become much more conscious of the harm that the excesses of consumerism can do to the environment when unchecked by common sense.

Nowadays, people are more conscious of the need to recycle trash, and that there is little justification for the excessive amount of packaging previously used to make a purchase seem somehow more substantial than it actually was.

Recently, I've begun to notice similar practices in China, as companies compete to cash in on the ever-growing buying power of the Chinese middle class.

I bought a package of cookies recently that serves as a case in point.

Just how long were the 20-or-so nondescript wafers wrapped in multiple layers intended to last? Eternity?

That's the impression you get from the packaging, even though a couple of teenage boys would polish them off in minutes.

The cookies came wrapped in a plasticized metal foil container with plastic lips along the upper edge so it could be repeatedly resealed air-tight after opening.

Inside this container were 10 or so smaller plasticized foil packs, each one containing a small white plastic tray that cradled two tiny cookies.

None of this was biodegradable, so one can imagine thousands of such cookie packages deposited in landfills for years to come as a testament to the ascendancy of unnecessary packaging over content.

Until manufacturers come to their senses, it's really up to us, the consumers, to protect the environment by staying away from such wantonly wasteful products.