OMG! OMG! OMG!
How did I miss this?!
For years I’ve been opening my online orders and rolling my eyes as I have to slit the thief-proofing on DVDs; cursing as I pry away the display-friendly plastic wrap around products that I have ordered (Hello!) online, untouched and straight from a warehouse; and calling into question the parentage of the people who invented those plastic clamshell case thingies. I will never forget the time I had to actually get a Phillips head screwdriver to detach a $3 car from the moulded plastic insert onto which it was screwed. Yes, really.
From time to time, standing in my kitchen wielding a blunt pair of scissors or doing the dangerous “Sabatier Knife Trick” on a reluctant package, I have gone off on my rant about how, come the revolution (mine, naturally), all manufacturers will be forced to wrap their products in plain sacks that can be reused (say, turned into pretty quilts, or dresses, or oh no wait, that was the American Frontier. How did we get so far away from that great idea, so quickly?). Stores can take one out for display and the rest will just be sitting in their biodegradable or recycled sacks, waiting for their new homes.
Well, apparently Amazon has read my mind. Again. (That whole “Kindle” thing was just eerie…)
Look! They have introduced a Frustration-Free Packaging standard and are using their, er, influence to convince manufacturers to get with the program.
The standard says:
Certified Frustration-Free Packaging means:
- Easy-to-open
- Recyclable packaging
- Ships in its own package without an additional shipping box
And behold! (As a mother of small children this picture really warms my heart.)
It’s not quite a burlap sack yet, but it’s one box and they ship it right to you in that one box. (Look at it there, in all its brown and black beauty). There are no pastic-wrapped wire ties, and no brown paper stuffed in the shipping box to make sure that stuff doesn’t slide around inside.
And they come like this right off the assembly line!
Be still my beating, green heart.
You can find a whole Frustration-Free section of their store here.
And no, it’s not the whole answer and yes, maybe we should just buy less plastic cr*p in the first place, but I really and truly believe that every little move helps. You can’t get many people to make big lifestyle changes quickly. But you can make lifestyle changes easy for a lot of people to make in small increments. This is one. And I LOVE it.
The only question is, how did I miss this until now?
You knew the Magnus Pyke reference was coming, didn’t you?! I still remember him blowing a gasket trying to open a package of shrink-wrapped processed cheese!
I left it wide open for you!
Imagine what he’d make of one of those moulded-plastic clamshell things. At least the shrink-wrapped cheese didn’t cut you back!