Can You Hear This?

The companies that make the packaging for the stuff we buy must be making twice as much as the companies that make the products in the packages. What’s up with that?

I love movies but I hate trying to get a DVD open once I bring it home from the store. It has cellophane around a plactic case and three strips of impossibly sticky tape on the opening edges of the case. If it’s shrink-wrapped, why the sticky tape, too? And if it’s a music CD you’re buying you get cellophane wrapped around a paper box, around a cellophane-wrapped plastic case with 3 strips of sticky tape. The cost for all this extra packaging is factored into the price we pay for the item and all that extra stuff just fills up the trash can.

If you buy an inkjet cartridge from the office supply it’s in a molded plastic container. If you can ever get that open then there is a paper box inside the plastic container. Open that and you’ll find a heavy foil-type wrapper and then finally the inkjet cartridge. I could write a tome in the time I spend opening packaging for an item not much larger than a box of matches.

You can fill up a landfill with the containers used to package other packaged items. Those molded plastic containers cover everything from ink cartridges, to kids toys, to disposable razors, to items found in the hardware store. It’s ridiculous!

You need one form of packaging per item and a price tag, thank you very much! And, no, I don’t think a bar code that has to be swiped by the clerk who’s annoyed you asked for a price in the first place is acceptable. While I’m in the aisle at Lowe’s comparing widgets, I want to know the difference in price between brand x and brand y.

I do understand extra packaging for some items such as OTC medication. They don’t want people in the store tampering or kids thinking it’s a new style candy, but I find those foiled bubble paks inside a box really annoying. For heaven’s sake, just put the stuff in a bottle with a child-proof cap. It’s been working great for years and you don’t have all that packaging filling up your garbadge cans.

Since most of this extra packaging is made from a plastic material, hence a petroleum product, those costs are going up too. Time to change, folks!

I don’t want to have to work that hard to get to the items I purchase and I don’t want to fill the trash up with the extra packaging, do you?