…expropriate your farm, board up your house, and let much of your land lie fallow while we spend 40 years trying to justify building a huge and unnecessary airport on prime agricultural and ecologically sensitive land. Um, I mean, I’m from the government and I’m here to preserve your green space.
(Doublespeak at its finest, as seen on the site of the still-on-the-books Pickering airport.)
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Shortly after I posted last month about wasteful packaging, we received another shipment of technology. Inside a single fairly large box were six smaller and very sturdy boxes. I could easily have stood on each one, much like I did with the power cord boxes from the previous shipment. Except these ones probably would have been strong enough to use as step stools in the kitchen. Inside each of these smaller boxes were two large, dense pieces of foam. Sandwiched between each pair of foam pieces was a single hard drive. Approximate ratio of the total volume of the hard drives compared to the total volume of the large box they were shipped in: 1:50. Approximate ratio of the weight of the product to the weight of the packaging: 1:5.
Can Sun really find no efficiencies here? The company claims that “packaging engineers determine how rugged each product is, and tailor the optimum amount of packaging for the product without compromising protection during tough simulated transit testing.” I think the packaging engineers are building in a bit too much of a huge margin of safety, especially considering that comparable equipment from other manufacturers is not packaged quite so heavily.
I had been planning to salvage the foam for other purposes, but the office cleaning crew beat me to it. At least I got to make a nice foam tower before it was carted away.
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This is just about the most egregious example of greenwashing I’ve seen. Fifteen per cent less plastic is still 85% too much.
Interestingly, Nestlé’s advertising in the U.S. claims that the bottle contains 30% less plastic, which I suppose is an example of greenwashing even more egregious than the Canadian claims.
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Compliments Beyond The Orchard Apple Slices (pictured above right with an unprocessed Pink Lady for comparison) are the most wastefully-packaged food product I’ve ever seen. It’s part of the Compliments Junior Disney line of prepared foods from Sobeys, which is supposed to feature “healthier, tasty, and fun foods that are designed specifically for kids.” You know it’s good if it’s in a package and Disney says it’s tasty! Although the CJD (hmm, where have I seen that acronym before?) line-up includes some prepackaged fruit and vegetables, it’s quite heavy on processed convenience foods like frozen pancakes, “Mickey Burgers,” pizza, and so on. The idea is to appeal to picky eaters. Hey, here’s an idea: why not serve real food instead of frozen pizza? Most kids of my generation think that frozen pizza sucks, and for good reason: it does suck. No amount of branding will ever change that. But frozen pizza is a whole other post.
I first saw Beyond the Orchard apple slices in the local Sobeys in early January, but didn’t see it again until mid-March. They’ve been in stock steadily since then, so presumably people are buying them. This package—a plastic box containing five individual sealed wrappers—contains just 285 grams of sliced apples, equivalent to about one and a half regular-sized apples. Each package contains seven very small apple wedges that together represent about one quarter of an apple. While I understand that this product may appeal to parents with young children who only eat half an apple or less at a sitting, it simply doesn’t excuse the overpackaging. If your children can’t (or won’t) eat a whole apple, then buy smaller apples or slice up an apple and eat half yourself. If the kids don’t like apples, try something else. Why does every problem have to be solved by plastic these days?
The apple variety isn’t identified on the packaging, but they look like Fuji or Royal Gala. It’s hard to tell because they taste a little off, with a distinct non-apple chemical aftertaste. The odd taste must come from the processing or packaging, although the ingredients list shows only apples and calcium ascorbate as a preservative. I actually feel sorry for kids who grow up thinking that apples come in little plastic packages and taste like this. Would I buy it again? Never. I didn’t even really want to buy it this time, but scientific curiosity carried the day.
Amusingly, each of the little packages carries a “ready to eat” label. Yeah, unlike regular apples that require hours of preparation.
(Quick note to the eagle-eyed: Yes, the best-before date on the package is March 24, and no, that doesn’t account for the odd taste of the apples. I conducted my taste test around March 20, and have only just gotten around to writing it up and assembling the pictures.)
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One of the things I love about my day job is getting to play with a lot of technology. One of the things I dislike is that a lot of the technology is packaged very wastefully. The picture above provides a good illustration. Yesterday’s shipment included a very large box that opened to reveal the 10 boxes shown here.
Each of those boxes then opened to reveal a very loosely packed component: five power cords (three of them individually boxed!), a keyboard & mouse, two sticks of RAM, two small internal expansion cards, and three slimline DVD-ROM drives. Everything removed from these boxes is in the little pile on the left in the top picture.
Now I understand why you’d want to put delicate optical drives in a nice sturdy box with foam padding, and why a company with a lot of inventory would value having a few standard-sized boxes instead of a bunch of loose components. I also understand why a company selling servers would want to ship each server and non-standard component separately and have me assemble them.
But I’m at a loss to understand why each power cord required its own crush-proof box rated to hold 65 lb and with a burst strength of 200 PSI. When I repacked all this stuff after checking it against the packing slips, it all fit into just one of the pictured boxes with the exception of the keyboard. The rest of the boxes went straight out into the blue bin, having served basically no purpose but to consume space.
Why ship in ten sturdy boxes (plus yet another box to hold all of the boxes) when just two will do? Why does each individual power cord need to be shipped in a separate box that a fully-ballasted man can stand on without crushing it? I’m sure the answer is “efficiency,” but I’m not seeing it.
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Winding up our Spring on the Spit series, this photo was actually taken early in the fall, after nesting season is over and the cormorants that nest in these trees have abandoned them for the season.
The area that contains these trees is off-limits to people during nesting season (April through August, if memory serves). After all, cormorants are Important Birds and need their privacy. Exploring this area each autumn, I always think it’s a shame that cormorant droppings destroy the habitat here. I’d like to think that it’s all part of nature’s cycle, but it’s possible that there are just too many cormorants here doing too much damage. It’s an eerie place to walk through when the birds are gone, and it looks like a war zone to boaters in the Outer Harbour.
Toronto and Region Conservation is hosting a public meeting on April 3 (PDF notice) at the Mennonite New Life Centre on Queen Street East to discuss possible approaches to cormorant management in Tommy Thompson Park.
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There’s a good-sized beaver lodge not too far from the southern tip of the Leslie Street Spit. It’s in the pond behind these trees, just out of camera view. Even if you miss the lodge during your visit, you can’t miss the work of its residents throughout this section of the park. The tree in the foreground of this picture has a large pile of fresh shavings at its base and will probably be felled by the industrious beavers within a few days. Their impressive lodge is big enough to be seen on Google Maps.
I didn’t notice whether the beavers on the Spit have been tackling any trees as large as their Don Valley cousins have been.
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Today’s spring picture from the Leslie Street Spit shows us an artfully-placed traffic pylon pointing up at last week’s waxing gibbous moon, already high in the sky in the late afternoon.
As an aside, I always used to think this phase of the moon was called a waxing gibbon until I was old enough to realize that the term would more accurately describe an ape with a Brazilian.
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Today’s photos of the Leslie Street Spit take us to the peninsula that contains the Outer Harbour Marina. The old ship’s bridge sitting on the peninsula’s tip is a familiar landmark to Outer Harbour sailors but is virtually invisible to most people visiting Tommy Thompson Park.
These pictures were taken in March 2004, before I had a high-quality digital camera. Looking at them reminds me just how much I miss Velvia and a proper fisheye lens. What I don’t miss is endless hours spent scanning slides. Still, I’m tempted to run a couple of rolls through the old camera this weekend. Maybe someday I’ll get a nice full-frame DSLR and have the best of both worlds.
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All of the heavy equipment was parked at the other end of the lot when I revisited the Unwin Avenue snow dump this weekend, so there’s not much in these photos to establish scale. The top of that pile of white snow at the centre of the picture above is about 8 feet high, if that helps. Enough of the snow has already melted that what’s left is indistinguishable from a pile of dirt from a distance. As the spring progresses, it’ll become indistinguishable from a pile of dirt even close up. All of this will be melting untreated virtually straight into the lake. The Don is also in for a rough spring and summer with melt from the snow dumps in the valley almost guaranteed to foul the river through July.
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