Kathy & I typically provide minimal contributions to our weekly trash pickup. Our household trash is usually less than half a trash bag, and our recycling bin is mostly empty glass jars and perhaps slightly more than a reasonable amount of wine bottles. We don’t buy a lot of “stuff,” use a minimal number of plastic bottles, buy mostly fresh food and frozen vegetables that don’t come in boxes or cartons and don’t get or throw out takeout food containers. So it was a bit surprising and somewhat embarrassing to see the growing pile of cardboard packaging and boxes in our garage before, during and after our Christmas celebrations.
Granted, a large majority of the cardboard resulted from the purchase of a new gas grill. The grill came in approximately 3000 (slight exaggeration) individual pieces, all individually encased in cardboard. I must say, however, that the artistry of the packaging was quite impressive. Each piece of cardboard was precision-cut and crisply folded, presumably by a well-trained robot or other machine, before being organized into a 130+ pound shipping container that came via Fedex.
About 30 minutes of work allowed me to break down all the boxes and pieces of packing and putting them into the grill box. We are quite fortunate that our trash pickup company will take whatever I can drag to the curb, including (hopefully!) the old grill. We’ll find out Monday morning!
Monte Stevens
I know exactly what you are talking about.
Tom Dills
All the cardboard and the work involved in assembling the grill made me wonder if it would have been worth having it “professionally” assembled. But it did make for a nice project for my son and 10-year old grandson on a nice warm Christmas Day. 😉
Mark
Very funny as I seem to recall a similar experience when we got our last grill. But I suppose the investment in packaging more than makes up for reducing damage risk in overseas transit. At least it isn’t styrofoam. 🙂 Hope all is well and Happy New Year.
Tom Dills
You’re absolutely right about it not being styrofoam! There were three nice cloth covers over the larger flat pieces which we kept, although we haven’t thought of a use for them yet! I wish more of the packaging was reuseable. The worst part was that I flattened the cardboard, put it all in the grill box but the recycling people didn’t take it so it ended up on the trash truck with the old grill. Frustrating!