There's too much freaking cardboard

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

For once, I’d like to see some effort being put into packaging products more efficiently. I’m not some sort of eco-freak or something, but come on.

I have a big cardboard box in my apartment that houses all of the cardboard that makes it into my place, until it’s ready to be taken downstairs to be sent out to the curb for recycling pickup. It’s way overloaded now, thanks to all the cardboard boxes from the holiday, but even during the rest of the year, it fills up pretty quickly with boxes from FedEx, Amazon, empty pizza boxes, cereal boxes and crap like that.

I get shipments all the time that represent the grossest abuse of cardboard. I bought some earrings for my sister on BlueNile.com this year and they were shipped in a box about 18" X 6" X 12". Inside that box was a bunch of foam padding and the box for the earrings, which was like a couple inches on each side. What a waste.

Why can’t someone invent a shrink-wrap with biodegradeable foam padding built in? Where the heck is DuPont when you need them?

At least the foam packing peanuts are getting better. I can save those and use them for future packages, or I can dump them in the sink and run hot water over them - the little bastards break down in the presence of water and you can literally wash them down the drain if you want to. Thank God, because I’d have 10 billion of them if they didn’t.

Ideas/comments?

2

When you find out, let software companies know, please. You go to buy a new piece of software and here’s what you get:

A box you could sell cereal in
A shrink-wrapped CDROM
A few pieces of advertisement for the company’s OTHER stuff
A registration card
A LOT of extra nothing

Why not just put all those extra bits of paper in the booklet that accompanies the CDROM? I havn’t seen a print manual with software in years. It’s usually on the CD. You could put the shrink-wrapped CDROM in those security cases like music CD’s and the cases can be re-used.

Some years ago, music stores were planning on placing hard plastic signs in the CD bins which would have the picture of the CD and on the back, the songs. A customer would take the card to the counter and get the CD. The store manager would re-order only what’s been sold and in would, in theory, cut down on theft. Why not software?