I’ve Started A War On Cardboard But I Can’t Win

It’s a Sunday morning. I wake up, ready to have the laziest of lazy weekends. When I go downstairs, the light entering through the window makes the kitchen look cosy as a blanket. It’s sunny outside.

I boil some water in the kettle and get a filter for the coffee from the cupboard. I bought them from Amazon, as no supermarket around here will have them in a size that fits the V60. It truly is an amazing coffee maker. With some practice, the pour-over coffee can be awesome. And the Hario V60 is so cheap! I also bought it from Amazon, and it cost me about £20 including the server jug.

It pairs so nicely with the coffee I got from Pact. Pact is a subscription service for coffee, that sends you a coffee bag every week (or whatever your desired frequency is) in a neat cardboard mailbox-friendly envelope.

As I am waiting for my morning dose of caffeine to brew, I absent-mindedly look at the pile of cardboard in my kitchen waiting to be recycled.

THERE. IS. SO. MUCH.

We hadn’t been home so we missed the last recycling bin collection day, which happens every other Tuesday. But still, how are we gathering so much cardboard packaging!?

Recently, I had to cancel two holidays in the same week. None of them were very fancy — one was a short trip with friends, and the other one was a visit from some friends who were coming to see me. The first one became a logistics nightmare due to fewer flights being available with the pandemic. The second one was canned because my friend’s dad tested positive for COVID.

This meant that I would have more money than I anticipated (look at me, seeing the glass half-full!) so I could use it for the headphones that I had been holding off on buying for so long.

So on Friday afternoon, I decide to pull the trigger. The cardboard issue still weighs on me. I might like buying nice things, but I still care about the environment. “Let’s find an alternative to Amazon”, I think.

You could say I usually research my purchases for way too long. So I had long settled on a specific pair of earphones — the Bowers & Wilkins PI7 (if you want my verdict, they are incredible). It turns out, the PI7’s aren’t available in any store nearby.

Since driving 40 miles to find them is not exactly eco-friendly either, I choose a store that can order them. John Lewis can get them brought over from one of their other stores and have them ready the next day, and it will be through their internal logistics. Sweet. This means they can use the same transport for many things at the same time, and I cut on the cardboard.

It’s Saturday morning. It’s cloudy today. We still have 3 more days until the recyclables are collected. I’m having my coffee, taking a shower, and walking 40 minutes to pick up my earphones.

I enter John Lewis and I walk to the collection area, where I show my ID and my order number. The shop assistant types the string of numbers on the computer and walks away.

A minute later I am greeted with my earphones… individually packed in a cardboard box. There is apparently no group packaging for the internal logistics, so my attempt has been futile.

Can we ever win?

For a moment it seems individual actions to tackle climate change are hopeless unless you are ready to completely abandon your lifestyle and not purchase anything at all.

In this process, what has the store done for the environment? I want to think that at least, by choosing to buy it there over Amazon, the shipment process was more available as they could group it with a vanload of products being delivered to the same store. In reality, what probably happened is that this was the van that was doing the home deliveries for all the individual orders, and this wasn’t much better (environmentally speaking) than choosing an Amazon Locker as a pick up location.

Maybe I should drive 40 minutes to shop in a smaller store, even if a quick math tells me that my tiny car (which is not exactly a fuel-thirsty SUV) would have put 27 kg of CO₂ into the atmosphere.

Or maybe stores could stop gifting us a Matryoshka doll of cardboard boxes whenever we buy something. That would be nice.