Something that really Bugs me

In this day and age when everyone is supposed to be "going green", there is a tred taking place in the retail area that is really disturbing to me. It is packaging and labelling. Yesterday I bought clothes. I bought 8 items of clothing and removed a total of 14 tags from them. Whenever we buy an item of small to medium size, it is packed in plastic (usually heat sealed Polyethylene) which will still be around for the next new millennium. I was thinking about the clothes though. If each item has an average of 1.4 tags on it, and a billion people buy an article of clothing every day, (random number, no statistical backup on that) that is that many pieces of cardboard that gets thrown in the trash. Hopefully people use their recycle bins. When I think of how much trash we generate as a family in a week, I feel okay, as we recycle a lot of things. But manufacturers of consumables should really work on cutting down on the packaging they use. The other day I opened a Little-est Pet Shop toy my daughter was given as a 'hope you feel better' gift after breaking her arm. It was in a cardboard box (1) sandwiched between two molded polyethylene sheets, (2 and 3) with another pet sheet wrapping each individual toy (4, 5 and 6) each one of them was tied to the cardboard box by two of those plastic twisty things that bread bags used to be closed with. (7,8,9,10, 11 and 12) So in a box 3 inches square by in inch thick there were 3 toys and 12 pieces of packaging. I don't think this is evil or insidious, but it is unnecessary and a waste of resources. It may not seem like much when looked at by itself, but imagine the millions of identical packages in toy stores all over the world....the mind boggles.

The thing is, we CAN do something about it. Go to the websites of the manufacturers of things you buy that you notice have excessive packaging. Every company has a feedback function on their site, or should. I once read that one letter received equates to 20 thought of but not sent, and companies do pay attention to that.

So let's get on them.