Today I offer just a couple more examples of unnecessarily wasteful packaging for ordinary products.
There seems to be a tendency to put fabric items, including some clothing I've seen and now these pillowcases (below) into heavy plastic zippered pouches. I suppose, to a marketer's eye, this turns them from ordinary goods into "luxury" goods. But it is completely unnecessary. These packets are too small to contain anything else, and I'm pretty sure I'm not going too far out on a limb if I say that most people aren't going to wash their pillowcases, fold them up, and stuff them back into these pouches. So they're just going to be tossed out.
A similar case is the HP ink cartridges shown below. HP can be credited with making it easy to recycle their used cartridges. They have even "upgraded" the packaging shown below (it now carries one of those "recyclable" emblems, whereas it didn't before). But the fact remains that the cartridges inside this packaging are less than half the size of the package itself. Recyclable is good, but since only a small percentage of these packages will ever be recycled, why do we put up with this kind of overkill?
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