Duncan Bell is sparking joy

You can have too much of a good thing – especially when it comes to its packaging

TALKING TECH

Duncan Bell checks out the companies tackling tech’s excesses by sending their plastic packaging packing

“The producer of THE most hated packaging ever has finally moved over to cardboard”

Do you remember Marie Kondo? She was huge a few years ago, thanks to her winning philosophy of decluttering your life. ‘ Look at all your possessions,’ she said, in Japanese, ‘and decide if they spark joy.’ Although interestingly the expression she used actually translates more accurately as ‘decide if they spark fluttering, throbbing or palpitations’. At least according to Wikipedia.

Those of your possessions that did not make you throb and flutter should be discarded at once, Marie advised sternly yet adorably.

I always thought this was sage advice in theory but remarkably hard to adhere to in practice. After a year or more of lockdown, it’s become all but impossible to follow. Brands have continued to send me mountains of stuff, and with the office shut it’s had nowhere to go but my spare room, which now looks like the back room of an upscale charity shop.

This was brought home to me especially hard this month when the bin men stopped picking up the recycling from my block of flats. Like everyone else in London I’ve been chucking out a HUGE quantity of cardboard and plastic packaging each week, and so when the bins stopped being emptied, my flat began to fill up with packaging materials awaiting the return of bin collections, because I am socially responsible. Meanwhile, the communal bin room downstairs started to fill up with packaging materials, because my neighbours are anti-social, selfish bastards, who won’t even hold the lift door open for you when they can clearly see you are carrying a heavy package.

There was practically no let up in the daily deliveries of products to review. So stuff continued to arrive, while no waste could leave at the other end. In a sense, the ecosystem of my block had become chronically constipated.

Soon, I began to seriously fear that all of the available space in the entire building would be filled with card, cellophane, polystyrene, bubble wrap and those Amazon boxes that are always 15 times the size of whatever is inside. My lifeless body would eventually be found crushed and emaciated beneath a mountain of bubble wrap, Rioja bottles and today’s delivery of 15 over-packaged Apple AirPods rivals.

Thankfully, in a perhaps slightly anti-climactic conclusion to this epic tale, the council resumed collecting the recycling just in time and everything was fine.

I often think future generations will look back on us and think, ‘ What the hell were these people thinking of?’ And a lot of their bemusement will be based on our frenzied accumulation of stuff. They’ll look at everything from the amount of plastic we’ve expelled into the seas to our hunger for fine meats and boozes in the same way that we regard sending small children up chimneys to clean them, or slavery, or Dave Lee Travis.

But maybe now is where the fightback starts. Apple and Dyson made quite a big stir a few years ago when they moved over to all-paper/card packaging. So while the amount of material required admittedly did not go down at all, at least it was now material that could be recycled.

Those kinds of brands have always at least paid lip service to trying to be a little bit more eco-friendly than the norm, but now even Gillette has changed over to paper packaging, which does feel significant.

Yes, the producer of perhaps THE most hated packaging of all time has finally repented and moved over to cardboard. This means that millions of tonnes per year of plastic waste will now not be created by people wanting to rid themselves of hair. As a side benefit, it is now also possible to open Gillette packaging without recourse to a chainsaw. Perhaps those disapproving future generations will look upon this as the dawning of the age of Aquarius.