I found this on the porch. It contains cardboard, plastic foam and one lousy video DVD containing about one minute of promotional video for an unknown product made by an unnamed company.
Its raw materials were harvested or pumped out of the ground, processed using water and energy, formed using more energy, prettied up with inks and sent far away using more energy. It came 450 miles by air, or if shipped by truck, even farther, just to plop on our doorstep. All in an attempt to sell a product that supposedly “Conserves and Protects” some resource, presumably water, without actually naming the product nor the company. Leaving them unnamed generates suspense, supposedly. Wasting all those resources generates anger, but that’s another story.
Let’s look at all that packaging. Cardboard box, printed with really cool graphics that basically tell me nothing about the future product. There went a bit of water, maybe a large bit, since the pulp paper industry is a large user of water. They’re also high on the greenhouse gas list, according to a quick online browse. I don’t know what kind of plastic they used to cushion the DVD, but I’ll bet it didn’t come from a tree. It’s foamy and thick, filling in the box so it would look like something worth getting. Then there’s the DVD itself. More plastic, more energy, more ink.
It didn’t just roll here by itself. Driving a semi loaded with 2,000 little boxes would produce about ten pounds of carbon dioxide. Per box. Not green at all. I have no real idea how many little boxes were on the truck that brought it here. No matter what, CO2 was produced.
The company notes that another video is coming later this month. So, another DVD, another 10 pounds of CO2, just to try to convince me to specify their “green” product?
I found the same video online. I don’t know how much water and CO2 it takes to stream a video, but it’s probably a lot less than shipping a whole advertising campaign’s worth of little DVD boxes across the country, each full of plastic foam, cardboard and plastic.
So, here’s a “green” product sent by a company who seems to lack even the barest grasp of sustainability. A strange effort to win a few dollars by touting an allegedly resource conserving product while flagrantly wasting water (the packaging materials), spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (packaging and shipping), and sending more junk into a landfill somewhere on the planet.
End result: the company doesn’t practice sustainable practices, and is beyond the normal level of cluelessness. Maybe their product does save water. Too bad than I’m convinced that the company producing it does not concern itself with sustainability in its marketing operations, and I’m doubtful that its manufacturing is very Earth friendly, either.
If they truly understand sustainability, why did they use so much packaging when a recyclable cardboard sleeve would have sufficed? Why didn’t they put all their information on the DVD so they’d only have to ship one copy instead of… how many will I get, anyway?
But look on the bright side. If I can find the gopher in the video (I can’t), I’ll be eligible to win an iPad 2! Nice to see someone is well funded during these difficult times.