The Greening of America - still a ways to go

I received my Staples order at work in a plastic bag that was 20 times larger than necessary to hold the two mini-BIC Wite-Out® correction tape holders it contained. (People wanting to talk to me about the ecology of correction tape, please take a number and line up to the left there).

The 20-times-too-big plastic bag had a big green sticker (!!GREEN!!) on it that said:

Make a difference.

Recycle your ink and toner today.

Staples claims on the green label that they have recycled more than 50 million cartridges!  Wow! Go Staples.....  Sounds admirable doesn't it?  And 50 million sounds like a lot, doesn't it?  But, hmn… is it really?

If you figure one printer per 10 people in the U.S. - that's at least 30 million home printers, not counting business printers.  So the 50M they boast about is 1½ cartridges per personal printer recycled in----how many years was that?

Hmn….

I opened the 20-times-too-big bag and took out the 2 little packages of mini-Wite-Outs®.  They are the size of thumb-drives, but themselves are blister-packed onto a cardboard backing.  And I had ordered the "ECOsolutions" version of the BIC Wite-Out®.

Any notion that this was "green" was in shreds because the two little containers had been sent out to me in a separate order.

So first, there was the over-packaging and the huge plastic bag (petroleum products in the manufacture and now landfill issues) … then the petroleum used to drive the thing to my work site … then the staff person used to deliver it from our Receiving area to me … and soon there'd be the cleaning person required to deal with the disposal of the 20x-too-big plastic bag and the cardboard (since we don't recycle cardboard or paper at my big worksite).  BIC says "we can be part of the solution."

What a waste of energy, time, resources this one little order was. 

I'm thinking maybe I should go back to the traditional "correction tape"-just crossing stuff out with my pen.  That seems about the greenest I could go on this one.

All those print cartridges, recycled or not - another reason not to print out so much stuff in our "paperless" work environments.

Read more about BIC's "eco solutions" - http://www.bicecolutions.com - I'm dying to see how they are "greening" the ubiquitous BIC disposable shavers and lighters....

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