User>Driven

Recently a wrote a rant piece on excessive and hard to use product packaging. I complained that consumer product marketers concentrate on the product to the exclusion of the interests of the consumer of the product. It seem seems Annelena Lobb of the Wall Street Journal doesn't agree.

Actually, Annelena penned a piece in the WSJ containing a mix of information from New Scientist and comments from the packaging industry itself defending packaging. With no analysis, Annelena reports that packaging protects products from being damaged or spoiling (and ending up in landfills), that shipping products around the world may cause more environmental harm than the packaging does, and besides, more green materials are working their way into the packaging industry!

I'd like to have posted a comment on how none of these points addresses whether packaging is excessive (or usable) but after allowing one defensive comment from someone calling herself "JoAnn Hines Packaging Diva," the WSJ seems to have closed the article to further comment.

Rebuttal

1. I believe packaging is necessary to protect products but much of today's packaging is more extensive, wasteful, and difficult to use than is necessary to meet that goal. There are plenty of examples in my previous entry on this. (Some makers of blister packs do seem to have gotten the message, though. The HDMI cable I bought for my Apple TV recently actually had perforations on the back of the package making it easy to open even with one hand.)
2. The environmental cost of shipping products all around the world may be real but it is entirely beside the point. This is nothing but misdirection. There's no reason why these issues can't be tackled separately.
3. The fact that green materials are being used more often is another red herring, IMO, and I think the WSJ knows it. The last paragraph of the story points out that some people believe corn-derived plastics are worse for the environment than plastics derived from petroleum because more material is used in the manufacture of the former.

Interestingly, the URL for the WSJ story reads in part "consumer-packagings-environmental-upside" while the published title is "The Murky Math of Product Packaging." I wonder if a first draft under the more positive headline was amended to include the less positive information and an editor wisely changed the headline.