Not-so-green Apple

[dr_kromm]

We had to order a replacement wall current-to-USB charger for our iPhone 3G because the old one was shockingly dangerous -- or so they say. Anyway, we're talking about an item the size of a large bullion cube with prongs. Being familiar with Apple's very compact packaging (our Shuffle shipped in a tiny box indeed), we were on the lookout for a very small parcel.

Yet when the thing arrived, it was in a rather large box. Heck, a case . . . you could ship a handgun in this thing. That's Bonnie's hand in the image to the right. The little white cube is the charger. I think you can appreciate how silly it looked, sitting there on the foam like the crown jewels. You could in fact pack 48 of these gizmos in there, with room to spare for the packing material.

The moral of the story is that Apple might be one of those Left Coast companies that cultivates a hip, hippy image, but they're not exactly with the program when it comes to "green" packaging. I'm almost tempted to order a screw or something just to see how it comes packed!

And yeah, I totally realize that this is a trivial thing to write about. It's just that overpackaging is a bugbear of mine. I'm still not over wasting an hour getting my new mouse to work because it was so well-packaged that there was packing material down in the battery well. Or maybe it was some hard-to-get Pocky that drove me mad. I'm not sure which.

Comments

[aota.livejournal.com]

I once ordered some little LED lamps to replace some regular lamps on some of my equipment. I think I order 30 of them. When they came in each one was in its own little cardboard box. An incredible waste.

[dr-kromm.livejournal.com]

Especially considering how indestructible LEDs are, yeah. I used to mess with them as a teenager, attaching them to Halloween costumes and other random stuff. I don't remember ever crushing or mangling one, although I did burn several out by applying excessive reverse bias.

[douglascole.livejournal.com]

My company has a bad, bad tendency to put a small drive component, for internal shipping, in a ginormous box. A coworker of mine once got about a hundred HGAs, which probably fill up volume equal to a box an inch high, and maybe the size of a piece of paper in cross section (80 cu in or so).

It came in so many boxes it filled up his 8'x8' cube, to eye level. They shipped it in groups of only a few each, and each group came in an 8x8x8" box, which itself was in a 1' x 1.5' x 2' box filled with packing material.

To your own device, I suspect that they got a half billion boxes of a certain type for a good deal less money than tailoring packaging would be.

[dr-kromm.livejournal.com]

So they're green, just a different kind of green. Like Senor Cardgage is a different kind of cool.