Richard Hobbs

I haven’t written a blog post for almost a month now, and that is mainly because so far in January, absolutely nothing has happened! I shall therefore end my comments on January now and move on to another instance of wasteful packaging!

As you may know, from a previous blog post on wasteful packaging, I don’t like to see examples of particularly wasteful packaging. I find it quite annoying, and today it has happened again! I have attempted to mask out the supplier because, although I would like to “name and shame”, I feel it might get me into trouble, so for now at least, they will stay anonymous.

Here is the box that arrived:

As you can see, the box is around 8″ x 8″ x 1″. What do you think this might contain? A book? A calendar? A DVD? Probably not a CD, because they come in smaller boxes, right?

Well, upon opening up the box, we can see what it contains:

A USB memory stick!

Now, I must admit, this is a rather large memory stick, at 16GB, but given that the extra bytes of storage don’t actually make the device any larger physically, did it really need a box this big?

OK, I can appreciate the need for a business to have certain box sizes, because having too many box sizes available adds to the cost of everything, so this is probably the closest fit they could find in their store, but nevertheless, it is a shame to see so much cardboard wrapped around such a small device, as I’m sure you agree!

Wasteful packaging is something that kinda bugs me. To put it into perspective though, I don’t lose any sleep over it, and I don’t find myself thinking about it at random times during the day, but when I see an instance of wasteful packaging, it is slightly annoying.

The other day, a work colleague ordered a 1.8″ hard drive for a laptop from an unnamed supplier. Admittedly, hard drives need some packaging to protect their internals, but I feel this particular one was packaged perhaps a little too much…

Needless to say, the hard drive went into the laptop, the cardboard box was recycled, but the foam will end up in landfill because it cannot be recycled!

What a shame!