Being a new year and a lot of different changes that have taken place has taught me some crazy lessons. The new world the United States has become is pretty much authoritarianism. This means that you have to deal with what you have because what you have now belongs to the state. This year I have taken more notice of certain aspects of life. The 2020 Covid 19 pandemic has changed the way I work and live on a daily basis. So much so that I now live as a hermit has in teh past and am forced by law to do it. In fact, it would be safe to say I am actually on house arrest due to the stay at home orders of my state. What this has done is to change the way I receive and give products and services not only for work but for my personal life. This means that instead of being able to shop and visit local stores, I am instead of being forced to purchase items online. This has indeed been convenient but I have noticed that I have been unable to eliminate all of the shipping supplies that have been used to send me all these items I have requested. This excess of cardboard sitting in my house has me truly acknowledge the amount of waste our country is creating due to the stay at home orders and in general.
Looking around my home I see a bit of an environmental shame. It hurts to see so much cardboard lying around. There is literally a pile of cardboard boxes and random shipping supplies taking up space in my garage right now. This amount of tape and paper and a random assortment of bubble wraps have been too much for me to dispose of to keep up with the amount of trash I am allowed to eliminate on a weekly basis. Currently, there is no way for me to recycle these items through my local trash company and I am feeling absolutely terrible about all this extra waste. But the state has forced me to do this and the world suffers for their rules.
Now, I have started to notice the amount of space that has been unnecessarily provided in the boxes I have received. Just last week I ordered a weed wacker to help control the plants growing on my property. My yard has been overrun with lots of different plant life and I needed a better way than hand pulling all the weeds to keep up with their growth. So I ordered an item on amazon. The box that is was shipped in was 5 times the size of the item. It was incredibly wide and longer than it needed to be. The main issue was that my weed wacker was actually in a box that was perfectly shippable on its own.
The use of the extra box provided by amazon was not necessary for any way and now my garage has a 5-foot long box that is 3 feet wide. The dimensions are so much larger than it actually needed to be. I would like to put out a request that boxes be shipped in the appropriate way from here on out. Try to be wise with your ordering and packaging if you work in that industry.
Packaging Protection 