11 comments Add a comment
I want to gripe about excessive packaging. Stop, wait, don't go. I'm not a tree-hugger and this isn't a "save the planet" rant. Honestly, I usually find it hard to care about "green" issues, but one thing I cannot tolerate is the stupidity of outright waste.
Typical example, last week I ordered a memory card for my digital camera. I bought it from a well-known online shop. The card arrived in a cardboard box which was almost A4 sized, nearly 1 inch deep. I wondered at first what it could be, since the memory card I ordered is about the size of a postage stamp.
I opened the A4-sized box and find within, another, A5-sized piece of card, emblazened with the manufacturer's logo, covered for good measure in impenetrable plastic coating, which almost required industrial strength cutting machinery to open. (Well, OK, a pair of scissors, but you get my point). All this, for a small, postage-stamp sized item!!
Who PAYS for this plastic and cardboard packaging?
Looking at the item itself, next to the packaging it arrived in, I could not help feeling astonished at the pathetic, stupid amount of waste here. The item took up less than 5 percent of the space of its packaging. In fact, the memory card probably used almost as much packaging (in total) as the digital camera which I bought it for! Seriously. How can this be right? How can it be justified? Apart from anything else, who PAYS for this plastic and cardboard packaging? It's customers like you and I that pay for it, that's who.
I'm no tree-hugger, but this particular issue is something that continues to grate on my nerves. The government are constantly lecturing innocent members of the public on environmental issues, while turning a blind eye to commercial organisations.
How about slapping some serious taxes on commercial packaging and get them to change their ways, instead of micro-managing ordinary people. After all, if our purchases weren't encased in such excessive packages, we wouldn't be throwing so much in our bins.
By: Owen
Leave a comment
The other day I reached up into a cupboard to take out a tin, when one of them suddenly slid off the top of another and fell out.
If one company can do it, why can't the others - doesn't it make sense?
Amazing deals to be had on ebay!
When I buy a plant in Homebase I get the tiller to wrap it in about 8 big bags plus some foam packaging and then have it all put in a cardboard box.
At the supermarket I want cereals to come in double size packs with half the content, and canned soup is often dented so better to manufacture individual boxes for each can. I miss those big boxes TVs used to come in cos now everything is flat screen.
The computer hardware companies should take them back and they can recycle them for to the consumer and he green world.
I do find the current levels of packaging ridiculous too and totally agree with the gripe. I have heard of people who unpack stuff at the supermarket and put the rubbish in their bins, but it must take nerve!
Actually it is the rise of supermarket shopping which has brought this problem about as far as food goes. When you went to the corner shop for half a pound of biscuits the shopkeeper took them out of a big tin & put them in a paper bag for you. Nobody would want to buy biscuits from Tesco that were not pre-packed as you wouldn't know who else had been handling them, so packaged they must be! The same goes for all sorts of goods which used to be bought "loose".
As far as alot of other things go, ease of display in the shop is to blame for some of it. Things need to be stacked on shelves or hung on racks so must be boxed or put on a card with a plastic bubble. With the case of things like memory cards I suppose the large piece of card does make them much harder to slip into a pocket!
The whole thing really comes down to fewer shop staff and more self-service.
hairyfairy