This column comes wrapped in old newspapers
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
If you live long enough everything comes back to you. I actually heard my son, Jack, who is in his late 30s and part of the computer age generation, admit he couldn’t open one of those plastic sealed packages that are so annoying to us old folks.
He finally borrowed my Exacto knife and cut open the package holding a computer CD disk he had to install on his mother’s
new computer. Before he finally reached the product, however, I heard him mutter questions I have long asked about most everything you purchase today: “Why is all this extra garbage necessary in packaging.”
Of course he is of the generation that created all that stuff that not only is annoying to the consumer and adding extra costs to the item, but it is also choking the landfills. He had already unpackaged the several boxes containing his mom’s new computer and left me the task of disposing of the packing material, much of it not recyclable.
The software package came in its own large box filled with Styrofoam peanuts that cannot be recycled. After digging through the electrically charged peanuts that cling to you, there was the plastic encased software disk. It is madness.
I come for an era where items you purchased came without all that sealed garbage. If the item was wrapped at all, it was in butcher paper and tied with a string. I made a purchase recently and said to the sales clerk I did not want the plastic bag she was about to put the already sealed in plastic purchase into. She said it was store policy and I could not leave the store without the merchandise being in a bag.
“Why?” I asked.
“To prevent shoplifting,” she said.
“But I have already paid for it and I have a line of people behind me to establish that fact,” I rationalized.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, “it is store policy,” then put my purchase into on one of the mandatory plastic bags. I simply removed my purchase from the plastic store bag and dumped the bag at her check stand. No bells went off as I took the “raw” merchandise through the store doors.
Sally Fields has a quick line advertising Boniva, the one pill a month for osteoporosis, saying, “that’s it.” What she doesn’t say is how she struggled to open the tri-fold cardboard container holding the single, small white pill inside a plastic bubble.
I have watched my wife trying to open the over-packaged pill, using a pair of scissors to snip the bottom corner of the tri-fold cardboard container to get to a one inch pull tab that allows you to pop the bubble and get to the pill. What she is left with is a pile of unnecessary packaging.
Little wonder the one pill costs $120.99.
If this super packaging is beginning to irritate the 30 somethings maybe the manufacturers will get the message. Perhaps soon a consumer can even buy items that are preassembled and don’t come with a bag of nuts and bolts that never fit into the right holes or require tools you don’t have.
There is light at the end of the trash tunnel. Recently, my wife bought two coffee cups via mail order. Oh, they came in the usual oversized box, but no peanuts, just old newspapers cushioning the shipment. Plus they came in a reused cardboard box with a note apologizing for the shipping container and asking me to recycle it to help save the environment.
I did, after I smoothed out the old newspapers and read them.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)