Unnecessary Packaging

It was damned good tea.  But I groaned as I stood at Pei Wei Asian Diner’s self-serve tea station and realized what I’d bought.  The Oolong tea from Evolution was bundled in a disposable tea bag, nestled in a tiny single-serving box, wrapped in cellophane and served with a disposable cup.  I had assumed they’d [...]

The UPS man knocked on the door, leaving a surprisingly large package. I had chosen this brand specifically, not only because it was relatively cheap, but it was literally 20% the size of my previous (and now broken) DVD player. Reduce my footprint with a smaller product, right?
What. The. #$%@.
Maybe they shipped the wrong item? [...]

I about fell over when I went to grab a piece of fruit for breakfast at the Days Inn West in Eau Claire, WI.  My family and I were travelling through on our way to our cabin way up north, and the drive is so long, we had to stop over for the night.  It was early in the morning, [...]

I came across this article on CNN.com when I was surfing last week…
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/08/26/trayless.colleges.ap/index.html
I had to laugh to myself.
I think people are (partially) missing the boat on what it means to be green.
Sure, I get the idea that getting rid of trays in cafeterias is supposed to cut energy and water, even keeping “water-polluting detergents” to a [...]

The following questions were raised by one of our readers in a comment to another post (thanks, Casey!), so I thought it would be a good idea to address them here.  I didn’t want anyone to miss them in case they didn’t read comments to previous posts.
The first question was about how to contact the [...]

I purchased a brand new Linksys USB Wireless-G Adapter from Amazon.com recently.  The seller mailed it in a box that just fit, with no extra paper or bubble-wrap.  That was good.  Unfortunately, the Linksys packaging itself was needlessly wasteful.  Linksys favors a layered approach, using double-boxes.
As you can see from the picture, the actual USB adapter is smaller than the starter CD. [...]

A member of my family allowed me to take a peek at his painkiller packaging yesterday.  He laughs every time he picks up his huge bag of fifteen Fentanyl patches at the pharmacy.  Here’s why…
 

In this first shot, I’ve placed a red Sharpie in, for scale purposes.  The box is not all that big, roughly [...]

These are the packages I LIKE to get.  The small ones.  The useful ones.  The ones where I don’t have to figure out what to do with 20 pounds of packing peanuts.  These are the boxes that make my life easier, which is why I order online in the first place!
First, we have the opening [...]

We recently purchased these nesting blocks for our youngest son, and the packaging was so hilarious I had to post.

In the picture you can see where the box advertises the “blocks nest for easy storage.” You’d think this important selling point would carry over to “nesting for easy packaging and distribution,” but the manufacturer decided [...]

We are a great nation of consumers.  If you sell it, we are going to buy it.  That’s the beauty of America!  Along with the rise of consumerism, we’re now finding that we need to kick up our conservation too.  Going green is definitely the new black- everybody’s doing it!  We encourage you to look for ways to [...]