Wasteful packaging is 18,000% too big

2 December 2008 by Nick

Between Apple and Amazon, delivering a simple monitor adapter takes up far too much space and resources.

Last week we ordered an Apple monitor adapter from Amazon (since Apple keep changing their monitor connectors, and none of the ones we have here seem to fit our new iMacs – and Amazon charged less than Apple for their own products).

To my excitement, I came in this morning to find a rather large box (over a foot long) has been delivered from Amazon – unfortunately Amazon hadn't made a mistake and sent me a load of free stuff (Christmas coming early!) - the box contained nothing but the single monitor adapter and a whole load of fresh air.

A very quick measurement of the box and it's contents show that even being generous with the ruler it took up less than 1/27th of the volume of the box. The adapter is overpackaged by Apple to begin with – I reckon that with just a simple wrapper that's closer to the size of the product, instead of large retail packaging, you could get around 180 adapters in the box that our single one came in.

It doesn't take a genius, or army of environmental activists to realise that a simple Jiffy bag would provide just as much protection, but take a fraction of the resources to produce and transport. When multiplied across the number of orders that Amazon fulfils, it boils down to a massive amount of space, in a massive number of delivery vans, dedicated solely to transporting thin air.

As two global companies who like to portray themselves as environmentally friendly and responsible, surely they could get their act together and find a better way of getting a simple cable packaged and delivered without such an impact on the environment?