When I came home from work a couple weeks ago, there was a huge box sitting at my front door. It was the size of a kitchen stove, and I thought perhaps it had been delivered to the wrong address. I saw the sender's label on the outside of the box and found it contained 2 packages of puppy training pads I had ordered online. The box barely fit through my front door. After opening, I pulled out enough air-filled plastic wrap to criss-cross my living room twice. It took me close to an hour to deflate the plastic so I could fit it in my recycle container and to disassemble the box. There was no way that box would fit in my recycle or trash containers, and I ended up paying someone to haul it away. The packaging erased the convenience and cost-saving by ordering online, and I won't order from that company again.
I don't order things online that I know will have killer packaging anymore. I'd rather pay a little more and go buy ceramic dishes or small kitchen appliances and now pet supplies in a store, so I don't have to deal with the packaging. And how about all that styrofoam?
But more importantly, we're still using the technology of cardboard boxes that were invented in the 1800's. The original non-corrugated box was invented in 1817, and others followed. For decades now, our community has asked that we recycle, and recycle pick-up and trash pick-up have more restrictions. It's time for the packaging industry to catch up. I don't want to spend a lot of time and energy breaking down a cardboard box, and I never want an over-sized one. Maybe boxes that are perforated at the edges and have a string that would pull through (like the string/strip on plastic packaging for cheese slices or the old gum package string) and easily separate the box into small sections is a possibility. The string could be covered by the paper packaging tape to secure it until it was time to pull it. Maybe a break-down function like that should also be horizontal with larger boxes. Perhaps a kind of hinging perforated into the cardboard and covered with paper packing tape has possibilities. I don't know if either of these would work, but I do know that packaging needs re-thinking. Or maybe if there's a drone delivering a package to my house in the future, it should fly back the next day to pick up the empty box.
I appreciate how the majority of items are packaged by QVC, but there are other online retailers and some merchandise using old-fashion, inconvenient, and sometimes unnecessary packaging. Packaging needs to be modernized.
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