Neutrogena Hydro Boost Sample Through Well.ca: How Much Packaging Does a Sample Need?!

I previously wrote a post (that you can find here) about getting a sample after shopping online at Well.ca, a Canadian online shopping site. The website has many interesting products including food, vitamins, protein bars, a wide range of baby products, kitchen implements, etc.. I’ve been very pleased with the website so far (their customer service is excellent too), however, there is one aspect of ordering products from them that makes me a little annoyed. When one places an order, depending on how much one has spent, certain samples are offered. One does have the right to refuse the samples, but in this case, I took the sample offered which was Neutrogena Hydro Boost gel cream. I figured it might be handy to take along when travelling instead of lugging along something larger.

I pulled it out of a drawer yesterday when I was organizing and was struck by how much packaging was involved in this tiny sample. There was a large plastic wrapper with an expiry date stamped on it. There was the tiny plastic tube of moisturizer. There was also a big coupon for buying more of the product printed in high colour on cardstock.

Big plastic wrapper, giant coupon, and tiny little sample.

So much waste.

Why is this coupon so big?

Why does the coupon have to be so huge or on cardstock? Why is a plastic wrap even needed when the tube is plastic? There is overpackaging galore involved in this sample. Neutrogena should reduce the amount of packaging that it’s using for samples. Our children are going to having nothing left but a pile of garbage if companies keep using so much wasteful packaging for all of their products including free samples. Well.ca, being a company focussed on wellness, should perhaps put some pressure on the companies that are sending samples to them to distribute to use less packaging for the “wellness” of the planet. 

Overpackaging impacts us all. Now I’m left with a plastic wrapper and a piece of cardstock which the coupon is printed on, all of which I will never use again and some of which I can’t even recycle. As for the tiny tube of moisturizer, once that’s gone, it will end up in a recycling bin somewhere too. I wonder if it would have been better for Neutrogena to put the lotion into one of those little tear open pouches which while they are not recyclable, they don’t take up much room. The tiny plastic tube, if it is recycled, will take a lot of resources to process. Too many resources are being squandered on things like redundant packaging. It’s time that we all thought of a better way to make our finite resources last.