I hate wasteful companies. You know the sort: the kind of people who send out the tiniest, most indestructible item known to man in the biggest and thickest cardboard box they can find, swathed in reams of bubble-wrap and funny foam crisp-like things. Or the kind of firm who insist on sending you their catalogue, week in week out, even though you’ve only ever bought the one thing that got you on their mailing list in the first place.
It’s annoying. There’s nothing you can do about it. The company doesn’t charge you for packaging – not directly, at least – and the most you can do with the acres of packing material is save it all in the hope that one day you’ll sell a huge, fragile item on Ebay and be able to recycle it.
A case in point is Novatech. They may be very swift and, in my experience, helpful mail-order company, but man they love their packaging.
This week they sent me these two relatively small and difficult-to-destroy items:
The wireless access point was snug in a cardboard box not much bigger than the device itself. It wasn’t going to move around or get crushed in there. A spindle of blank DVDs is virtually indestructible. But that didn’t stop them packaging these items in a box this size:
I mean, what? That’s the biggest box ever. Those foam things are now filling a shopping bag to the brim, in the bin. There’s nothing else I can do with them, aside from collecting them forever or scouring the country for some kind of ‘foam things’ recycling centre.
Amazon tends to package things well, with the minimum of waste. Even Ebuyer, though they love their packaging, generally use plastic bags filled with air as padding, which don’t take up a lot of space in the bin once you burst them.
So all companies, learn from Amazon’s example. I’m fed up of having a bin full of cardboard, funny foam things and plastic bags. Imagine that multiplied across the entire country – it’s a lot of crap nobody wants.
P.S. Fulham railway station or Fulham Broadway station? I can’t decide!
