COACH: Excess Packaging & Our Forests, Our Wildlife, Our Air, & Our Future

I once visited a Coach location in my local mall to purchase my sister a gift-card. (I personally don't see the allure in Coach products; it's just a brand name, like anything else. There is nothing special or original about a Coach purse.) The sales associate helping me (just doin' her job, no doubt) placed my gift-card in an envelope (alright, normal); placed the envelope in a gift box; secured the box with a ribbon; placed this ridiculous little package in a gift-bag, and handed it to me. It was one of the most absurd things I have ever seen.

Excess packaging. This is a popular trend and radical problem which overwhelms our landfills and depletes our forests more than the average consumer cares to know.

What the average consumer doesn't know is that the Southern United States is the world's largest paper-producing region. Millions of acres of Southern forests are clear-cut annually to go to the Southern mills which support our country's paper industry. These diverse forests have been converted to crop-like rows of trees in order to cultivate the trees to meet our country's paper demand, which ushers in the use of toxic fertilizers and herbicides. Deforestation decreases air quality; contributes to global warming; and robs wildlife of their habitat, destroying our natural ecosystems.

Furthermore, each person in the U.S. generates approximately 300 pounds of packaging waste annually, and 32% of domestic waste is comprised of packaging materials alone. Not only does our country have an issue with producing wasteful amounts of paper products, but also does not dispose of it sustainably. All of these paper products end up in landfills.

Paper is the most commonly used packaging material (34%) with plastic following closely behind (30%). Currently, 25% of the 2.4 million hectares of trees cut down from Southern forests become packaging. In 2004, more than half of all of the trees that were cut down, chipped up, and processed into pulp became the packaging for other products, not products themselves. This is the reality of a culture addicted to excess which has developed a lifestyle that only feed and perpetuates that habit.

There are multiple reasons why the packaging industry uses so much material, which can be boiled down to either performance or presentation. Performance includes reasons that qualify as safety, health, and/or protection purposes. Presentation is solely aesthetics. How good does it look? How is it branded by our company? How quick will it sell? How marketable is this product? Coach falls here on the spectrum. Nothing about the performance, safety, and health of a plastic gift-card will be jeopardized from slipping it into a single envelope and handing it to the customer. By the way, Coach isn't the only national company which continually wastes packaging materials for reasons that seem superficial and trivial by nature. Try most fast food restaurants, supermarkets, make-up and cosmetic lines, Apple... and the list goes on.

Meanwhile, as our country does next nothing and the consumer remains clueless... our forests are turning into tree plantations which cannot possibly support natural animal and plant life and the scarcity of trees convert less and less carbon monoxide in our air to oxygen.