I realise that theft is a serious problem, and that by adjust their packaging to make items larger it makes them harder to conceal and thus steal, but I think it’s timne we took a serious look at packaging. Yesterday I bought a small zip-linq. It’s a very neat retractable USB cable. For travelling it’s going be ideal – when I manage to get into the package! The plastic is so tough it’s difficult to even start opening it, and then when you do it’s glued in such a way that you have to really work to get at it.

Yesterday I met a friend of Rene’s who recently had to remove a lot of toys from their packaging (so his company could write reviews) and he said “I pity any parent buying lots of toys who doesn’t have wire cutters”. I now know exactly what he means!

Apart from the inconvenience of not being able to get at my purchase, the packaging also uses a lot of platsic, plastic that doesn’t have the look or feel of the bio-degradable sort you now sometimes see, that will no doubt end up in some refuse dump somewhere never to decompose. In this age of increased environmental awareness surely that fact alone should be grounds for reviewing how we do things?

I make it a policy to not buy from companies who’s policies I disagree with. In the UK that extends to all the large media stores (following their attacks on CD Wow last year) and I think the time might be right to start extending it to companies who’s packaging seems to be both unfriendly and unenvironmentally friendly. I realise that most companies won’t notice my missing purchases, but we all have a responsibility to the environment and ourselves to try and improve things. If everyone did the same then maybe, just maybe, companies would start to pay attention. Many of us live in democracies that work hard to defend our rights, but how many of us actually exercise those rights fully?