OK, so you buy the toothpaste in it’s fancy cardboard box and bring it home and first thing you do is throw that dyed, bleached, often not even recycled cardboard into the rubbish bin, or hopefully at least the recycle bin. You do it, I do it, and gazillions of households world wide do it ALL THE TIME.

How many trees die for that? How much nutrition in the soil do we deplete growing trees for such useless What’s wrong with shipping these in their tubes? In stacking them on the shelves in a batch instead of a tower of boxes? What’s wrong with displaying them in trays we preserve to display them? What’s wrong with making a successful marketing feature of their LACK of wasteful, resource stripping, price inflating, self advertising on those boxes? How much cheaper would our toothpaste be? Perhaps it’d even offset the rising cost of it caused by higher transportation costs with the rising cost of petrol. And the tube itself has the same info on it! It can even have the barcode.

But why stop there? What about tubes of tomato paste? Why are they also often in boxes? Their tubes aren’t lewd, they are sturdy, and they are also safety sealed even without the wasteful, resource wasting, cost inflating, self advertising cardboard box. And why should we pay these companies for this wasteful box? Why should we have to take responsibility for ditching it the moment we get the product home? Why should it be part of our environmental burden on the world. It’s the companies ‘rubbish’.

Let’s tell the companies to stop boxing our safety sealed tubes. Let’s tell the companies to save us the money, save the soil the nutrients and land clearing those wasted trees are stripping, save us the drama of filling up our recycle bins with their unnecessary self advertising.
What can you do?

You can go to the website of these companies and send them an email or feedback letting them know that if a similar product comes on the market which doesn’t waste your money and the earth’s resources on unnecessary packaging, that you’ll be switching brands. If enough of us do it, we can save a forest of trees, lower the load on our rubbish bins and help keep prices down.

Here’s the letter I’ve sent (feel free to use it):

I have bought your product for years. These are times of greater awareness of the unnecessary wastage of the earth’s resources, the unnecessary use of dyes and use of trees and creating landfill. As such, I would now buy a similar product which saved the money caused by higher petrol/transport cost and simultaneously saved resources by not supplying the already sealed product in cardboard boxes which are immediately thrown away after purchase.

Donna Williams

author, artist, composer, screenwriter.

http://www.donnawilliams.net