I’m 25 for a few days now. My birthday was celebrated with the guys at Vuzum, my family, Antonia, some of my friends and a lot of Chinese food (ducking duck tongues taste so bad). The presents are great, either geeky (Boa Squeeze, Darts Game, Memory Card, Griffin Elevator, Rework) or sports equipment (yeah, I know!) which I love very much, plus some other items, from which I specially want to mention the Remington grooming kit, because I’m growing a beard (cut the hair, growing beard).

I had no time to unpack and look over the presents until today. I’m the kind of guy who goes through all the packages, who studies the pack design, what’s written on them, what information the book that came in the package contains, and so on.

Trees

I notice small things such as “Designed on Earth. Mostly in California. Made in China.” on my Boa bag, but also the 136 pages that came with my Remington grooming kit! And this takes us to the subject of this post. I said 136 pages, and you know why? So they can fit in that book tens of languages which I don’t care about. How many pages are written in my language? Only 6. So they wasted almost 23 times more wood, they cut 23 trees instead of one.

Muliply that with.. let’s say one million products. They cut 23 million trees, instead of 1 million. See what I’m doing? See where I’m getting? It’s plain stupid what such guys do!

I wonder why didn’t they add only a book written in my language, or better yet, half of paper with a web address, where I can read about all this information, plus watch images, videos and maybe happy clients! Let’s be smart, let’s save the planet product by product!

Water

We drink a lot of water at work, in plastic bottles. Than we throw away the bottles, and buy new ones. Why doesn’t anybody do a special bottle that allows us to refill or swap it in the store, and save the need to create new bottles and waste more of the planet’s resources?!

Evolution

We need to adopt digital books and documents now. Imagine how many trees we’d save!

We need to optimize public transportation by using bicycles.

We need revolutionary packages, to reuse or swap at the store, not throw away or recycle.

We need to do better.