After watching everyone open there Christmas presents this holiday season it was hard for me to ignore the amount of packaging waste that is created from consumerism. Not only did each present come wrapped in paper treated with metallic coatings, inks and dyes; the presents themselves were wrapped in a gross amount of crap. Cardboard boxes, Styrofoam, plastic bubble wrap and, of course, that extremely hard plastic packaging for small electronics that you need the "Jaws of Life" to open. It is truly disgusting!
I would like to find out how much extra waste is produced over the Christmas holidays. I bet it is astonishing. Of course, this behaviour continues throughout the year, but is intensified at Christmas by the obligations people feel they have to buy for others.
In my opinion, efforts to develop packaging solutions should be at the forefront of the environmental checklist. There has to be a more environmentally friendly way to transport goods. At least the goods, themselves, can usually be used for reasonable amount of time. I would estimate that nearly 80% of the packaging that these goods are shipped in is disposed of immediately. Yes, some of it would be recycled, but it was still produced to serve one purpose; getting it from point A to B. Not even close to a sustainable system!
An environmentally friendly packaging solution that lowers company expenses would be worth billions. I wonder sometimes how much unnecessary space some of these packages take up. I know that they are designed by engineers, but it seems like all that extra plastic was used just to hang those headphones on the wall of the store. I recently ordered a book from Amazon and was delivered in a box Four times the size of the book. The empty space was filled with bubble wrap. How can that make sense? Companies should be focusing on reducing the space consumption of packaging. Just look at Ikea! They have mastered the art of space utilization and it translates into extra dollars. There is less packaging and more units can be transported by one load. Makes sense to me so why doesn't it make sense to them?
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Christmas has become so commercialized that I don't enjoy the season anymore. I have lived in 2 other cultures and prefer the simplistic views they have for the major commercialized "holidays" that Western society has. Of course they have over-hyped days of commercialism too but not to the extend that we do.
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