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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

The amount of plastic and paper packaging/marketing that you are forced to accept and dispose of when you buy products is getting extreme. I recently bought a micro-sd card, and had to dispose of: 1. the large shipping package, 2. the enormous (in volume and mass) product plastic shell package, 3. the glossy paper marketing insert inside the package, 4. the user’s manual (!), 5. the unwanted microsd-to-sd adapter. Probably 99.5% of the mass shipped to me was trash. Ridiculous that the manufacturer and shipper can just externalize that cost onto me and inevitably the environment.

I’d expect they could ship me the bare sd card in a tiny envelope without all that waste if they were incentivized to.

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As a consumer though you could also have bought it in a store or waited until you needed something else as well.

I never understood the mindset of buying only a usb-stick or similar online.

Yes, the waste is obnoxious, but the consumer isn't always innocent either.

I wonder how far you have to drive to offset the benefit in waste from shipping

Well I hope you wouldn't be making a long trip for the sole purpose of buying an sd-card either.

Some sort of emergency? Sure, but that is hardly the norm.

I figure it is a wash. The shipping package can and does get reused, so I’m really complaining about waste items 2-5. Totally useless.

Ordering 2 items from Amazon will almost certainly result in two separate packages being shipped to you. (At least that’s my experience here in Germany - YMMV.)

Then don't order from amazon.

I had the same experience with a local webshop here (bol.com). I needed two types of batteries but these webshops are more like marketplaces. They don't have a feature to search for items from a particular vendor. But I was able to simply browse and order the two types of batteries from a single vendor.

Next day: two packages. From the same vendor.

(Now that I think about it, the original sin was buying a product that is not rechargeable.)

I have almost always gotten them in the same box. Often the box might be a little big, but when two things come from Amazon at the same time they invariably show up in the same box.

Buying in-store or via delivery service (as opposed to Amazon) is almost guaranteed to increase the amount of plastic packaging. Many stores have those stupid anti-consumer clamshell packages (mostly to reduce shoplifting, but at high environmental cost).

Let's not forget all the packaging in shipping the item to the destination as well (that you don't see because it's discarded in the shipping room floor).

It's gotten to the point where I simply don't buy unless I absolutely need it anymore.

> It's gotten to the point where I simply don't buy unless I absolutely need it anymore.

I mean, that is the most environmentally friendly solution.

Only the outer shipping package would have been any different though. The rest sounds the same as I'd see it in a shop.

The market could fix this if retailers were legally required to publish a searchable packaging database listing the total amount of packaging they use per item sold. Comparisons could be made. Worst offenders singled out. Consumers could force change by having the knowledge to make an informed decision.

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