While building up my coaching practice, and spending more time with my dog, I was half-expected to pack for the upcoming Chinese New Year. So when work started getting busy, and my work study remains somewhat messy with packaging materials (read: cardboard boxes) accumulated through online shopping in 2020, I drew some flak from within the family.
On one hand there’s always the naggy feeling that those cardboard boxes can be reused or if I can put some of those stuff back into original packaging I could potentially sell it for a higher price when I do need to resell them (which by the way, is environmentally friendly and economical). But on the other hand, my house has its limits with carrying capacity (hint: extremely limited capacity) and I don’t want the reputation of being a hoarder.
We really need to do this better – this whole packaging thing. Making them more sustainable, more reusable, more re-deployable. There is really way too much packaging being used, especially with gifts – think about the amount of ‘value’ that is extracted from mooncake packaging. We need to start telling each other the story that we appreciate rustic packaging-lite (or even non-packaged) gifts. We need to deploy technologies to reuse the packaging so that delivery guys just have to press a button, reveal the product you ordered and have you grab it off him and he can reuse all the other stuff that carried the product and keep it safe. Because it we don’t, capitalism and all of these commercialisation is on this ratchet that sucks up resources for trivial things, that squanders valuable resources, and ignores sustainability.
Thanks for reading my rant.