Plastic Packages Cause Injuries, Revolt

massysett writes "Everybody has been frustrated by plastic retail packaging that's nearly impossible to open. New toys and electronic gadgets arrive encased in plastic bubbles. Manufacturers say the packages protect goods and make them look nice, but opening them can be difficult enough to cause injuries that land people in the emergency room. Manufacturers have an appropriate term for the frustration: wrap rage. One man even invented a cutter designed specifically for cracking open plastic clamshells."

Comments

Recycling

[dakirw]

Not only are these packages hard to open, many are difficult to recycle. What a waste of petroleum!

You want rage?

[overshoot]

Yeah -- then the product doesn't work, you attempt to return it, and the retailer points out that they only accept returns of the complete package (presumably so that they can close it up and let some other poor schmuck buy it, until eventually someone keeps it rather than go to the trouble of returning it.)

Alternately, they insist that the obviously-enormous forces you used to open the package must have damaged the product, so it's not their problem.

Yeah, both are bogus and if you stand up for your rights you get action -- but what do you want to bet a lot of people don't?

Patience, grasshopper...

[pla]

but opening them can be difficult enough to cause injuries that land people in the emergency room.

Oh, gimme a break. A pair of scissors applied in the correct spot will open just about anything you can fit on your lap (you may need something more heavy-duty for larger items, I will admit).

As the bigger problem here, many stores balk at taking back defective goods if you've turned the packaging into confetti. Given that we have packaging so sturdy that you can't remove it without reducing it to a pile of ragged plastic strips, that makes it difficult to take back most products (although in most states, they legally must take it back if defective, and that includes software/dvds/cds - Look up "warrant of merchantability" and your state's laws on the subject - "State law" trumps "store policy" every time).

Personally, I think every product should have a sort of magic pull-string... Just untape the string and pull it, and the otherwise-invulnerable packaging neatly falls away in two or three tidy chunks to reveal its contents (and which, with a bit of care, you could reassemble the packaging enough to return it to the store without much fuss).

EMT shears

[steveha]

For opening those plastic bubbles, I use EMT shears. You can get them at a hardware store and they aren't expensive. (I think I paid US$3 for mine.)

For round bubbles, I take my pocket knife and punch a starter hole, then switch to the EMT shears to open the package. But often there is a flat heat seal around the package, and you can simply take cut the seal part off and get the package open.

steveha

Re:What do other people do?

[Ninja_Popsicle]

You can also get a pair of curved sissors used for cutting R/C car bodys at a hobby shop for around $5. I use them all the time and find them to be quite effective. I remember there was also a Penny-Arcade strip about this "issue", but I can't find it at the moment. Meh..

Re:What do other people do?

[Ledsock]

The Penny Arcade strip can be found here

Re:plastics

[Quadraginta]

Looks like someone failed their polymer chemistry course.

Well, I've taught polymer physics -- the chemistry is not what's interesting here -- so it would be most unfortunate if that were the case.

Whether a plastic is glassy or not does not correlate with whether a plastic is transparent or not.

What makes something cloudy or opaque? You need structure on the scale of the wavelength of light to scatter visible light. Undergraduate physics tells us that something with a high crystallinity, made of lots of microcrystalline domains, is probably going to have such structure, and amorphous (glassy) substances -- which as you've pointed out yourself have far less regular structure -- will probably not. Hence one generally expects polymers with higher crystallinity like polethylene to be opaque or cloudy, as indeed they are, and polymer resins with low crystallinity like PS to be clear, as, by golly, they are.

Here is a little intro on polymers from the American Plastics Council, in which you'll note the following:

"Amorphous polymers are generally transparent. This is an important characteristic for many applications such as food wrap, plastic windows, headlights and contact lenses. Obviously not all polymers are transparent. The polymer chains in objects that are translucent and opaque are in a crystalline arrangement...The higher the degree of crystallinity, the less light can pass through the polymer. Therefore, the degree of translucence or opaqueness of the polymer is directly affected by its crystallinity."

Hmmm... do you suppose those silly folks at the American Plastics Council failed polymer physics, too?

Re:Nah, you can have your cake and eat it too...

[Dun Malg]

Small widgets are sorted and packed at high speed by machines. If you design a package that can be opened by the pretty feeble forces a human fingertip can exert, then it's not going to be able to be sorted at 80 MPH by the metal claw of a robot.

Heh. By machines, eh? You've obviously never worked in a factory. In my desperate youth I worked many minimum wage factory jobs. You'd be amazed at what they HAVEN'T automated. Put handles on plastic buckets? People do that. Assemble high voltage electrical connectors for the film industry. Yep, people with electric screwdrivers. But the number one thing I have always seen done by people, never by machines, that'd have to be packing and shipping. No 80mph conveyor belts-- any company moving product THAT fast isn't doing it on one line, they're doing it on several lines in parallel. High speed stuff breaks too easily. Certainly no expensive robots that, when they break, can't be replaced by calling the temp agency and having them send another the next day for the same $5/hr you were paying the last one.