Matryoshka Dolls

A box arrives; you open it to find a second box surrounded by air bags. After jumping on the air bags to startle your lab mates, you open the second box to find a small bottle nested by foam peanuts. But I lied it was not just one box. How many boxes do we receive daily in one particular laboratory?  I could not say. I do know that the size of a box could tell me how big an object can never be. Otherwise there is no correlation between the size of the object and that of the box.

Now reader, you might be thinking “Silly girl, of course chemicals require additional protection during shipment”. I will ease your mind, harmful chemicals come in a bottle, wrapped in thick absorbent towels, inside a thick plastic bag suspended in absorbent foam, inside an aluminum air tight cylinder (very difficult to open I should say) inside a box, surrounded either by packaging paper, air bags, foam or other. Oh and I forgot, sometimes you are lucky and get multiple cylinders. I’ll tell you now about space, say the chemical bottle is two inches tall, the cylinder might be more than a foot tall; can you guess the size of the box? The box will most likely be able to fit two of these cylinders. Since the box is too big it creates the need for additional snubbers. Then I wonder, wouldn’t it be nice if we had smaller boxes?

Small box, Danbo

However, we also order other stuff. Harmful chemicals are not the only ones being subjected to numerous entrapments. Last week we killed a pH electrode and needed to resuscitate it, I mean replace it. Once again, we can observe the Matryoshka effect, the electrode itself is small, but since it’s made out of glass and any scratch to the functioning surface would render it useless it must be protected. Clearly, it comes in a foam bed within a “small” box. When the electrode arrives you get a box that could easily fit about twelve of the small boxes, with room to spare because they don’t concur in length. What’s the purpose for that second box, when the electrode rests protected in its foam bed?

Ever since I started grad-school, shipments of supplies have perplexed me. Often I have joked that if I don’t become a research professor I would certainly go to work for any of these companies and manage the boxing and shipping department. I would save so much money from my innovative boxing ideas that I would become their hero. Because, think about it, boxes and snubbers are not the only resources being wasted. You have to ship them, and to ship them you have to put them in a transportation device, which can only hold so much space and weight for that matter. For each trip, an x amount of fuel is used and parts are damaged, which must be repaired or replaced.

The associated cost is not merely monetary, it also has an environmental impact.  Where did the cardboard box come from? If you sum all of the energy invested, what was emitted to the atmosphere, to the land, to water sources? And after all that process, when you have the box in your hands, will it be reused, recycle, thrown away? But we are missing one R, reduce. The amount of packaging is an excessive Matryoshka that must be reduced. So I should change my major, study industrial engineering, and eliminate unnecessary boxes. 

Mafalda. The last panel reads "In the space era everything is possible"