Perilous Packaging

We all know about this:

This year, Consumer Reports magazine gave an award for the worst plastic clamshell packaging to a warehouse-store version of a Uniden cordless phone set: It took 9 minutes 22 seconds to unwrap completely and nearly caused injury to the person opening it. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, injuries from plastic packaging resulted in 6,400 visits to emergency rooms in 2004.

And that's probably way underestimating the total extent of packaging-related injuries since not all injuries might require ER visits, but they could be quite debilitating nonetheless. Of course this is another great idea (not):

Then consider the patent granted a year later, to Thomas Perlmutter, for the brutally sharp OpenX tool, designed for clamshell-cracking. He's put about a million into those frustrated human hands, and demand rises sharply around the holidays, he said. Another opener called KwikCut is sold in the Home Improvements catalogue.

Great! Use a really sharp object to open a hard plastic shell which then becomes...another sharp object in your hand!

Consumers are way ahead of the industry with these concerns, said Aidan Petrie, chief innovation officer of Item Group, a Providence, R.I., product design firm. He pushed clients for years to use more inviting and minimal wrapping, to no avail. Now that big retailers like Wal-Mart are trying to curb waste, he predicts "a sea change" in how things are presented.

If Wal Mart gets behind it, the shear volume of goods they sell should improve the situation for all goods sold dramatically. Let's hope they come up with a good solution.