It has been recently brought to my attention of the waste that LEGO has with packaging. A few TECHNIC sets I recently got had boxes two-thirds full of air. A single motor from LEGO came in a 12x8x6.5 inch box.


What are your thoughts?

It has to do with standard packaging and automated packaging systems. The more sizes you have, the more complex the system needs to be. You may find that to be a lot more wasteful Just throw it in the recycle bin.

- Xander

Alternatively, I sometimes save nice boxes so if I need to ship something, I have boxes.

Yup, I do the same, I have a nice pile of them and the packing materials I put in a separate big bag, so I can reuse them, too.

- Xander

I love getting boxes. They come in handy quite a lot, so I have stacks of them in my basement. You might even, ahem, build a robot out of it.

Got a box today! Well, ok, a padded envelope with a small box inside. It's the new Mindsensors LightSensorArray
On their way are:
* A Raspberry Pi
* A HiTechnic Force Sensor
* A HiTechnic MiniScope

I love packages!

- Xander

Sometimes I look at all the piles of packaging and think what a waste, other times I realise how lucky I am to be able to get so many things that require packaging. I too like getting packages:-)

I have mixed feelings about Lego packaging. The Technic sets used to come in amazing boxes with polystyrene/plastic structures inside them and I quite liked that for the ability to store special sets in. But it was a lot of packaging. The current boxes don't feel at all special, and it is almost disappointing to open the huge boxes to have a few small bags and flimsy instructions fall out! With the Lego MBA sets Lego tried initially to send out the small plastic bags of Lego plus (lovely) instructions in a Jiffy bag, but there were loads of problems with the instructions getting damaged in the post so they have changed to shipping them in boxes.

But yes, I think they could do a bit better than they do now, although I would imagine the energy used/CO2 output (or whatever environmental metric you might want to measure against) for the packaging is relatively small compared to the Lego parts and especially electronics inside. It all helps though.