About a month ago Dell announced with great fan-fare that they were the first computer company that offered their customers the chance to be carbon neutral, by planting trees to offset the carbon dioxide generated in producing a years worth of electricity for the computer. Nice idea.

They’re lucky that they specifically didn’t mention packaging, and saving the forests. I was down in Hamilton today for work, and a box from Dell arrived with two sticks of RAM for a new Dell server. We’re talking standard 1GB ECC sticks of ram. The packaging for these two unremarkable sticks of memory amounted to no less than seven boxes of increasing size (think japanese dolls), 8 peices of packaging foam, and one long strip of “air bubbles”. Two of the boxes contained absolutely nothing except for packaging foam, and were just used to pad out the medium size boxes, so that the boxes containing the actual ram didn’t bounce around. The two sticks could easily have fit in just one of the smaller boxes! The waste is unbelievable, see the picture below with your own eyes.

click for fullsize image

With the number of trees that died to support this packaging effort, I sure hope that the $6 I pay to make my desktop carbon neutral plants a lot more trees than is strictly necessary!