Age: Technically, it’s been around since bananas came with skins and coconuts with shells. More recently, however, it has become less good. It’s wasteful and unnecessary packaging, isn’t it? Well, there it is: 300 million tons of plastic waste is produced every year, increasing by 9% annually, and with 91% of plastic not being recycled. In the UK alone, almost half of the estimated five million tonnes of plastic used each year is packaging. Often, as with shriveled bananas, this packaging is completely unnecessary. Sounds like an absolute horror show. It is, but there’s another new packaging beast: air. So you have plastic, which takes 500 to 1,000 years to decompose, and you want to talk about air, which, the last time I took a breath, was actually pretty cool? Have you ever been bothered by that huge box from an online retailer, which you open to find… oh, just a pack of faucet washers, for example? Yes! So annoying. And wasteful. But I do recycle cardboard. How bad is it, in the scheme of things, compared to plastic? So guess how much air is sent into British homes every year because the cardboard boxes used are bigger than what’s inside them? Well, I give up. 85 million cubic meters. Oh my god, that’s terrible, even if I have no idea how much that is. How does that compare to the size of a continent like, say, Wales? Wales is for region, remember. For volume, we use… Olympic pools! How many olympic air pools are there? That’s 34,000 Olympic swimming pools. In other words, oversized packaging means five million unnecessary delivery trips per year and an additional 85,000 tons of carbon dioxide emitted. Then you have the unnecessary extra packaging itself – 170,000 tonnes of cardboard a year and 480 million square meters of plastic film, at a cost of £40 million. Just going back to air, it’s not always just air, is it? No, sometimes the extra space is filled with shredded paper, packing peanuts, bubble wrap, plastic, so now we’re back to increasing those waste numbers as well. Research has found that enough of these fillers are used each year to fill London’s O2 Arena. I’m just imagining the Dome stuffed with packaging filler and thinking how much fun that would be – but that’s probably not the right way to look at it. No it is not. Say: “I’m deleting everything in my cart until it’s free of unnecessary packaging – and delivered by an owl.” Don’t say: “How many Olympic-sized swimming pools do you have in an O2 Arena?”
