i’m trying to open this pack of batteries yesterday, and i’m using scissors, a knife, my teeth at one point which was stupid but i was committed. the whole time i’m thinking about how this plastic shell is gonna outlive my kids. some archaeologist in the year 3000 is gonna dig this up and be like wow they really cared about these AAA batteries.
i read somewhere that plastic takes like 400 years to decompose and honestly that feels conservative for whatever they wrapped my phone charger in. this stuff could probably survive re-entry from space.
eanwhile the actual product inside breaks if you look at it wrong. my headphones last 3 months but their plastic coffin will be here when the sun explodes. make it make sense
there’s something deeply wrong about how the container is stronger than the thing it contains. like imagine if they buried people in titanium coffins but the actual person was made of tissue paper. that’s basically what we’re doing with everything we buy. the box my laptop came in could probably stop a bullet but the laptop itself dies if i spill coffee near it
sometimes i think about all the plastic packaging i’ve thrown away in my life and it’s all still out there somewhere. just existing. completely fine. i pulled my back trying to open a jar of pickles last week but that clamshell packaging from 2007 is somewhere in a landfill doing great. thriving even
quick question before i go
who decided we needed packaging this strong. was there some crisis i missed where people were losing too many items to weak plastic. did society collapse because a action figure fell out of its package. i need to know who sat in a meeting and said you know what consumers want? packaging that requires power tools
i did eventually get the batteries out.
only took 20 minutes.