Recently, I ordered two tubes of cat treats and two fairly modest cat toys. It arrived in a box I could sit in with enough plastic padding to make a polar bear weep. Has the world gone mad with excess packaging?
As comic as this picture may be, excess packaging is a major problem. It uses energy and natural resources to produce and once we’ve got it, it can be very hard to get rid of.
Sure, I can recycle my giant box (not that that’s much comfort to the trees it took to make it) but we could be stuck with that plastic padding for several hundred years.
I’m not alone in worrying about this. When we asked Which? members to send photos of things they thought were over-packaged we got images of everything from flowers to print cartridges.
We’ve embedded a gallery of the photos we’ve been sent so far and if you have any examples please send them to helpwanted@which.co.uk and put ‘excess packaging’ as the title. We’ll continue to publish the worst ones.
Who do you think is responsible for excess packaging? Shops or manufacturers? Do you think excessive packaging misleads us about the size of certain products?
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