As the parent of a young child, I have faced my share of over-packaging.
Toys, especially the ones a child wants to play with immediately, aren’t just packed tight in a rigid cardboard box. They are also taped, glued, wired, and even screwed in place.
It seems like overkill to me. We recycle the cardboard and reuse those crazy long twist ties when we can, but it still seems like such a waste of resources.
Toys aren’t the only items that seem over-packaged. There are also electronics and single-serve food items.
Last year, Amazon.com began offering Frustration-Free Packaging with 19 of its most popular items.
And recently, I’ve started noticing the packaging differences with different brands of some items. I drink hot tea a good bit, and am not brand loyal.
Most recently, I bought a box of Celestial Seasonings, and noticed that the tea bags don’t have little tags or strings.
The manufacturers say that leaving out those little tags helps save more than 3.5 million pounds of waste every year.
Do you buy products based on the amount (or lack thereof) of packaging? Which brands do you most recommend?
Toy packaging is horrible, but the sad thing is that the reason for it is that it is deliberately difficult to get into it is that if it wasn’t, people would break into it in-store and steal the products. Same argument for what looks like overpackaging of small items in blisterpacks – they are made to be too big to fit into a pocket. Maybe the green response to packaging would be to lock up all the thieves so we don’t need thief-proof packs