The Distance Project

I hate packaging.

Posted on May 8th, 2007 by Zach.
Categories: Sustainability, Systems of the World.

Can I be any clearer than that? Let me try: I hate Blister Packaging with a fiery passion that knows no bounds. You know this stuff - every electronic gizmo comes in it. It’s a clear plastic shell that is totally impenetrable, the Fort Knox of packaging. If you were stuck on a deserted island with no tools and had to get it open to eat, you would either starve to death, or else die accidentally slicing an artery on the razor like edges.

I mean is there anything quite so stupid? It is such a nightmare, people are developing special tools to open this kind of packaging. Check out this one.

Pretty smart, but according to an article I read, the tool comes in Blister Pack. Great. Still dying on the island.

Vendors love this stuff I guess, and factories make the packaging process easy (plus there is no currently viable alternative, so the point is moot). If I order a pallet of items from overseas, not only do I get my product all packaged up coming out of the factory, but they will put my branding and instructions in the thing so I don’t have to do any assembly afterwards. You would not believe what a hassle reduction that is for a company. And reduced hassle is my dream come true these days.

Blister packing protects the products from damage really well too. Plastic really can get fairly beaten up and still look decent on an in-store display.

You want to experience waste? In my life it is when stores send back product because the PACKAGING is damaged. I love this, it always makes my day - the product is fine, it is just the protective shell that is beaten up. What? But this is not a knock on the stores. People don’t buy things with beaten up packaging. They just don’t. This may sound like stupid reasoning, but I have recently learned a lot about how people buy in stores (myself included) and presentation means a whole lot, it may be the only thing that matters in many cases.

It is hard to steal anything that is contained in Blister Packaging and that is a plus, but this is mainly due to the fact that there is so much plastic around the product. As an example, I recently bought a set of earbud headphones. There was at least double the amount of plastic in the packaging than in the product itself.

These aren’t the ones exactly, but you get the idea.

Douglas Adams once announced that a society which had instructions on toothpicks was broken. Me? I think when the material in packaging exceeds the product, we are all in big trouble.

What is truly excellent is that our plastic trash will be here a while. This stuff sits around for the odd 3-6 thousand years. It is typically a low grade plastic too which cannot be recycled. Instead we throw it away about 12 seconds after tearing into it as consumers. Broken System Alert.

The worst part of the whole thing is that plastic is made of petroleum. In an age where oil is getting more and more valuable, it is insane that we use so much in such useless situations. Thinking about the Oil economy takes up way too much of my time these days, but at least it is usually based around situations where Oil is being used because there are no other systemic options. This is true in packaging of course, there are no other great options, but it seems like this is a fairly easy systemic fix. Proof yet again that if I was a billionaire it would be fun to start the next generation plastics lab. There is no reason packaging has to stay around the way it does. And maybe we could save the oil for, you know, driving firetrucks around or something?

Next up in the Packaging Vent-A-Thon: Cardboard….

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