Cleaning up

I was cleaning up the bench today and pulled out my bag of bags. Over the last year, I’ve kept the plastic bags Digikey and other electronics suppliers have used to package my orders. If I order 10 types of capacitors, I get 10 plastic bags, each labeled with the product info, which is good for storage but not good for the environment.
I purchased some Kraft paper coin/money envelopes from Staples, they are 3.5x6 inches which hold all my discrete components up to some of the larger wire wound resistors. I normally transfer the contents of the plastic bags to the Kraft paper, it holds up well and the leads don’t seem to puncture the bags.
Here in “progressive” Northern California, our waste company doesn’t accept plastic bags for recycling. So, I’d like to challenge Digikey and the E-supplier community to come up with a better way to ship our products. I appreciate the use of paper and cardboard for the rest of the packing material, but if you could go this one step further, we’d take our collective plastic consumption down a notch.
Cheers,
J. Sergneri
Petaluma CA

Hello @JSERG,

I have forwarded your concern to our user experience team to review. Thank for taking time to let us know your concerns.
-Robert

I don’t mind the packaging, but it’d be great if I could somehow send used bags/IC tubes back to digikey for reuse.

I too have too many “bags of bags” and IC tubes I don’t need that could easily be reused. The bags are in fine shape, as are the IC tubes.

If there were a shipping address, such as “Digikey: Recycling Dept” or some such, I’d happily eat the cost of shipping the reusable bags/chip sockets I’ve built up over the years back to Digikey for reuse. Perhaps Digikey could even offer some kind of petty incentive for returning recycled materials based on a digikey account#. And perhaps some limit of only one return box per year or some such, to prevent overwhelming their receiving dept.

Hello @erco,

Thank you for the comment. I have forwarded this to our user experience team to review.

-Robert

I also came here to say this. I’ve just received an order from digikey with at least one bag per component; in some cases I had ordered 2 of the same resistor and I got a bag with two other bags inside each with one of the resistors in it. What an incredible waste.