We order a ton of stuff online. One time I was on my front porch when our mailman was making his rounds and he hit me with a little jab - “What, no packages today?” …and that was before COVID-19. Now that we’re ‘Rona Hermits and a casual trip to Target is a decidedly unattractive proposition I’d guesstimate that our online purchasing has doubled. I don’t think we’re actually buying more crap (the occasional retail therapy flare-up notwithstanding), we’re just having more of it shipped as opposed to buying it in a brick-and-mortar.
…and shipping means boxes.
Lord almighty, we’re drowning in ‘em.
Funny thing about central Ohio - we do have recycling, we do not take as aggressive a stance on it as, say, California does. I have a recycling bin. It’s less than half the volume of my trash bin, and only gets collected once every other week. The thing is typically full from our “backlog” the day after it gets emptied.
Along similar lines: when we moved to California we became reusable grocery bag people, when we moved back to Ohio we remained reusable grocery bag people. …however, right now grocery stores have differing policies on reusable grocery bags. Some require you to bag your own groceries if you bring your own bags, some disallow them outright. You can’t actually recycle plastic grocery bags in the blue bin so I don’t have to worry about the bags taking up valuable box space…but also, I lay in bed at night thinking about what mass this wad of bags can achieve before I have to worry about the family dog going into orbit around it.
What’s my point? The boxes, the bag-wad - don’t I have bigger things to worry about than these? Yes I do. Maybe I don’t have a point…but I think there’s an opportunity for perspective here, something profound that can be gleaned from the trivial.
Summing it up: I have sufficient financial means to have to worry about how I’m going to deal with the packaging for all the stuff I’ve bought.
Just think about that for a minute. Then mebbe think a minute more.