I agree, but the most wasteful packaging is for food. I throw out small amounts of electronics packaging a few times in a few years. I throw out heaps of food packaging every week.

Catch 22 situation. Many plastic wrapped objects last longer than paper/non wrapped objects leading to less waste at the store.

organic waste vs garbage with hundreds of years staying power

Bioplastics would be a suitable replacement, and if properly incentivized, local municipalities could collect it in a separated waste stream for conversion to energy (which would contribute towards offsetting the collection cost).

With China no longer accepting dirty recyclables from the US which are terribly hard to process we're probably on our way back to multi-stream recycling. Sad fact is that apparently the recycling truck is one of the worst causes of contamination when it compacts otherwise good recyclables. It's a bit more effort and a significantly higher rate of trash versus recycling, but in the end I think it would be worth it. Your idea has merit as well, though last I knew bioplastics still had some problems to solve in order to replace standard plastics, still worth pursuing.

Of course the somewhat simple alternative is to slightly change the consumer model, where you bring multi-purpose and longlasting packaging, they put the stuff in it. Dispensery type shops. That already exists in a few shops around Europe at least. You bring your container and fill it up with grain, liquids, whatever.

I can't really make up my mind on whether that would work for all food types. Maybe there's some heavily processed food that is dependent on being sealed until eating. I know potato chips bathe in nitrogen while sealed.

I wish Apple would switch from using expanded polystyrene inserts [1] to cardboard for their non-Pro iMac packaging. So much of this polystyrene must end up in landfills rather than being recycled.

The iMac Pro uses moulded cardboard inserts [2][3], so why can't the standard iMac?

[1] https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/desktops/21.5...

[2] https://www.amsys.co.uk/week-imac-pro/

[3] https://youtu.be/UxuhecF-3c0?t=153

Absolutely agreed. While I was incredibly impressed by the design and quality of Nvidia shield tv packaging, it went into the trash and recycle bin pretty much immediately. It gave me a "oh wow" feeling of excitement, but really could have been sent in brown box and not made a difference that lasted more than 20 seconds.

Years ago I unpacked a Kindle from a brown box and that gave me a wow feeling. Sustainable packaging doesn’t have to be a bad experience.

I didn't mean that sustainable packing would be a bad experience. Just that Nvidia went overboard, sure it was slick and impressive, then it was thrown out. The amount of money and time that went into it was a complete waste of money.

Incidentally, the Japanese are very good at it.

For some reason, I found the packaging of everything better in Japan, even for the most simple items. Among the best are the ones made of paper and cardboard.