Tag: packaging

Single use plastic?

This is a plastic egg carton from Tienda Inglesa.

We have not bought eggs from Tienda Inglesa in years – five or six at least. I discovered eggs are cheaper in the street market (feria) so bought eggs there, but because the best feria packaging for a dozen tends to be a plastic bag, I started carrying this with me. Now I buy them next door in recycled cardboard trays of 15, and put them in this container for storage (actually, we have two of them).

Five or six years? At least, and quite probably more.

And why the one egg on the lid? Because this single use container, meant to be opened 12 times at the most, has been opened and closed hundreds of times and is still springy enough that without a weight, the lid will pop back over the rest of the eggs.

And most people will simply throw it in the garbage.

At the taller

While in the States in September, I got to thinking about the pobre Meriva, as our worker referred to our Chevy minivan after seeing the loads it carried. (I wanted to get a four-door pickup when we arrived in Uruguay; wife nixed that idea.) We got it in early 2010. Paint’s fading, windshield best replaced because of scratches from volcanic ash from Chile a few years ago. But it runs well, and the prospect of shopping for anything in Uruguay is generally dreary. So when I got back, I got some repairs done: replaced the serpentine belt in the engine at 90,000 km (supposed to have been changed at 45,000), body pained, and maybe the windshield one day soon.

Quite a few weeks after the paint job, I noticed the strip between the top of the doors and the roof was looking pretty bad.

incomplete car paint job
I’ve been parking inside. This after just a few weeks?

I took it back to the shop (taller) and showed it to the owner. He walked around the car. Whoever painted it simply skipped that area. No problem, he said. Of course, to finish the job will now take another three (Uruguay: read four) days.

While waiting in the garage, I became fascinated with the packaging of a replacement door.

replacement car door cardboard packaging

The strings aren’t added afterward. They’re an integral part of the design. They wrap around little round plastic fasteners.

cardboard package string fasteners

What an elegant (in the engineering sense) solution!