Plastic un-fantastic

It happened on the Batsman’s 1st birthday. It was the day when I first saw the craziness of this. As a deluge of birthday gifts arrived at the party for our precious first boy it became apparent. Do tell, what is the deal with the extraordinary level of plastic packaging around children’s toys?

I remember coming home from his party with the swag of presents he had received. We began to unwrap them, to enjoy them with our little guy. The pile of wrapping paper as well as plastic packaging, plastic ties, tags and other assorted bits of crap plastic quickly became much larger than the pile of toys themselves. It bothered me. IT IS RIDICULOUS.

I have tried very hard ever since to buy gifts that are not over packaged in this superfluous, environmentally unfriendly way. There are so many beautiful “eco” toys and gifts on the out there, one only has to do a quick “Goggle” to find them.

The Batsman and the Bowler often receive lovely gifts when the special days roll around and yesterday I had the occasion to attempt to “de-package” one of them for today’s play. It’s an ark fishing boat complete with Noah a fisherman and an assortment of lovely animals. Here it is:

And here is the amount of packaging we had to unfurl to get to it:

There is a box, an inner box, some other bits of cardboard, 23 (yes 23!) cable ties holding pieces in place and a few other bits of “not plastic fantastic”. It took almost 20 minutes in my carefully planned chaotic day to undo it all. Like I said, ridiculous. Now I am not so naive that I don’t understand the role packaging plays in marketing, presentation and perhaps even (as the Captain pointed out to me) prevention of shoplifting. But for the love of loopy mums and dads everywhere, you can’t possibly convince me that this amount of packaging is even necessary, never mind the planet health implications.

So I know this is not one of the biggest issues going down right now. But it bugged me. It bugged me enough to sit here and write a post about it. It left me shaking my head at our human “wisdom”, that we think we need to use precious resources this way, boiling up a whole lot of poisonous chemicals to do it.

What do you think about the “not plastic fantastic” issue? Have you had any recent moments where you’ve been left shaking your head at the crazy stuff we humans do? What efforts (no matter how small) do you make to counter our overuse of plastic?