Shoutout to the box waste after every gear upgrade. | Freelance Videographers

Blair Chen · 2026-03-02T09:45:59.039549+00:00

This pile of cardboard and plastic is out of control.

Ugh, I get the recycling point but it still feels wrong. That mountain of packing foam and air pillows from my new monitor just went straight to the landfill. The box was recycled, but all that other junk wasn't, and it was half the volume. Feels like a shell game.

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troychen6mo ago

But if recycling mostly just moves the trash around, doesn't that mean the real fix has to happen before the box even gets made?

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anna8726mo ago

But really, is it that big of a deal? Most of that cardboard gets recycled if you just break it down. A lot of the plastic clamshell stuff is the same. It just looks like a huge pile before you deal with it. Feels like making a problem out of a normal part of buying things. Sure, it's waste, but so is all the pointless stuff we buy. Maybe the fix is just buying less new gear.

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robertblack6mo ago

You say most cardboard gets recycled, but that's assuming a lot. The recycling system is broken in a lot of places and a huge amount of that material still ends up tossed. Even if you break it down, it's still a ton of waste created just to wrap something you bought for five minutes. It points to a bigger problem with how much stuff we make and throw away. It might be normal, but that doesn't mean it's right or not worth talking about.

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