Do you want packaging with that?

Hell, no.

Who wants to come home from the store and fill a garbage bag with plastic wrap, rigid plastic, plastic glued to card and lots of card on its own? This is quite apart from the styrofoam and cardboard left over when you unpack your latest offering from Amazon.

Just look at the supermarket. Ironically, much of the processed food is in mostly recyclable containers - cans, bottles, cardboard boxes. Not so the fresh food - styrofoam trays wrapped in film. Individually shrink-wrapped cucumbers. Non-recyclable containers at the deli. (I try to take my own, but that causes a crisis as they poor deli workers were trained to discourage sustainability because, you know, hygiene. (That doesn't fall under 2020, but expect an independent post on how efforts to eliminate potential pathogens actually makes us sick)

A couple of years back, the New York State Health department took leave of its senses and declared that any cheese sold at farmers markets has to be wrapped in plastic. Gone are the days when a farmer cold take a wheel of cheese to the market and cut off just as much as the customer wanted, wrap it in paper and pop it into a basket or shopping bag.

Oh for the days when one could buy a pair of scissors without needing another pair of scissors to cut the new one out of its impenetrable plastic fortress. Or a dozen loose nails.

The woman who sold me a fountain pen that arrived in the manufacturer's box, wrapped in side another box, inside a post office shipping box thought that she was sending a message of ultimate customer service. Instead she lost a customer. I will not patronize a business where the packaging is about ten times the volume of the product.