Pet Peeve of the Day

My pet peeve of the day: OVERPACKAGING! According to the Environmental Protection Agency, one third of the trash in America is packaging materials. Did you know that in Germany, you can leave any packaging you don’t want at the store - and the store has to deal with it? And why do manufacturers have to put minuscule amounts of a product in such large containers?

I recently purchased this moisturizer:

The jar had a "fake" base. In reality, the cream only went
as far as the bottom of the "screw part" of the jar.

And these vitamins:

Which took up about 1/5^th of the bottle.

As a kid, I loved surprising my brother by wrapping a small gift in a larger box, then slightly larger, and then on to a huge box. It was fun to see him unwrap package after package. It made for a great joke for a birthday or Christmas, but the current packaging of many household goods is almost as bad. We now live in the crazy world of Styrofoam trays, shrink-wrap, blister packs, and impossible to open clamshells. Toy packaging, for instance, is SO over the top. They come packed in a hugely oversized box, with the toy in a blister pack (that cuts you when you try to cut through it) tied in with wire (which sticks right into your hand when you try to untwist it), with more plastic bits to hold the wire on. Then you are left with a mess of cardboard, plastic, wire … it drives me insane.

I've decided to write - NO, email the manufacturers, stating that although I like their product, I will not buy it again because of their overpackaging. Simply put, there's too much packaging out there, and most of it is purely MARKETING. And it's all designed to give the consumer the perception of greater value when buying a product. What a waste of resources and money.