Amazon Prime: Box in a Box the Sequel

Another sizable box from Amazon Prime

I ordered a present for one of my sister’s children. It was a hopper ball for children. The package was shipped through Amazon Prime. I have had a series of overpackaged items from Amazon Prime (you can find links to other posts here and here and here).

When this item arrived, the box was large. I was confused given that the ball is just a deflated piece of plastic and should not have occupied much space (especially since it is a small child's size).

I was confused as to why the box was so large for just one item.

When I opened the box, it was filled with two huge long pieces of folded brown packing paper.

Lots and lots of paper.

More packing paper nestled around a cardboard box. 

Once that was removed, there was a box that the hopper ball was in. A box within a box (just like when I ordered diapers from Amazon Prime, link here). The hopper box was quite small and there was no wasted space inside of its box. The waste came from Amazon Prime alone. Why could they not have wrapped the product box in paper or plastic or even used a bubble mailer rather than a much larger than needed box plus all of that paper?

A box in a box.

The product itself looks tiny compared to all the cardboard and paper that it came wrapped in.

The paper and the box are of no use to me, so they went right out to the recycling. What a waste of resources. Even if they are recycled, it takes a lot of energy and resources to both produce and recycle them. It would be much better if they had not been used in the first place. I have had a few Amazon Prime packages that were wrapped very well in that they did not use overly large boxes or a lot of packing materials or redundant boxes, but many of my packages from Amazon Prime are overpackaged (and from reviewing Twitter, it seems that a lot of other Amazon customers are experiencing overpackaging).

Packaging is something that companies need to pay more attention to as they start receiving more online orders and have to ship more. Overpackaging is a problem that is going to impact us all in the future when our precious resources have been used and there is nothing left but a bunch of garbage and mountains of recycling to process.

Recycling Day: When Overpackaging and Waste Are Really Apparent

In my neighbourhood, as in most, we have recycling day every two weeks. A big truck drives around a huge area of the municipality (or multiple municipalities) and picks up recycling from each house at the curbside. Not everything is accepted for door to door recycling (examples of exclusions include plastic bags, Styrofoam, old electronics, batteries, and lightbulbs, etc.). Plastic and metal are put together in bins. Glass is supposed to be in separate bin. Paper goes in bags. Cardboard goes alongside the bins (someone told me a story about their cardboard being rejected by the recyclers once because they didn’t have it tied with twine, fortunately our recyclers don’t enforce this antiquated and wasteful rule).

This week, my husband out of town on business again, I hefted all of the recycling from our place out to the curb. Even carrying a huge amount per trip, it took me two trips to get everything to the curb. Part of the reason for this is the cardboard boxes from supplies we’ve ordered from Walmart and Amazon Prime these past two weeks. The pictures below are of just two weeks worth of recycling from our household (two adults, one who is travelling for work often and therefore not here to consume as much as usual, and a baby). I also didn’t bother taking the glass to the curb, as we only have a few glass containers, so I’ll wait until we have more.

I can't believe this is just from two weeks and a household of only two adults and one baby.

When I go out on walks and see our neighbourhood and others nearby on recycling day, I can’t help but be struck by all of the packaging our society uses (plastic boxes for spinach, endless yoghurt and milk containers, cans, cartons, and so much cardboard). Sure, some things need packaging, but there is a lot of overpackaging happening. If we decreased the amount of waste and moved to more of a zero waste position, think of how much less would have to be picked up on recycling day and processed (which takes a lot of energy and resources too). If we didn’t produce so many packages, we wouldn’t need to recycle so many packages. We would use less resources and there would be more left over for the future generations. So, while it's wonderful that we're diverting so much waste by recycling in Canada, it would be better if less waste existed in the first place.