John,

Everything's bigger at Costco -- including wasteful packaging. Tiny products on their shelves are encased in massive shells of plastic or cardboard packaging.1

The result? Every time we come home from a Costco run, we end up with a bunch of extra trash.

Plastic packaging is piling up in our landfills and the environment. Companies should be cutting back on unnecessary packaging, not creating more waste for us to deal with.

Urge Costco to stop supersizing its packaging.

The packaging-to-product ratio at Costco is ridiculous. A half an ounce of eye cream is surrounded by a 10-inch by 11-inch package. It's a waste of resources.

The bulk-buy store shouldn't be forcing the bulk of packaging onto its customers. But Costco is choosing oversized packaging by design. Costco claims that the large packaging provides another place for marketing, reduces the risk of shoplifting and better fits the pallets it puts directly onto the shelves.2

But that larger packaging is also contributing to the plastic pollution ending up in our rivers, streams and oceans.

Our oceans are already filled with 170 trillion pieces of plastic pollution. The last thing we should be doing is putting more plastic into circulation.3

Costco can chart a better path to keep giving customers the products they love without all the excessive packaging.

Tell Costco to cut back on oversized packaging.

Thank you,

Ellen Montgomery

1. Dominick Reuter, "Why Costco uses curiously large packaging for tiny products," Business Insider, February 26, 2023.
2. Dominick Reuter, "Why Costco uses curiously large packaging for tiny products," Business Insider, February 26, 2023.
3. Michael Birnbaum, "There are 21,000 pieces of plastic in the ocean for each person on Earth," The Washington Post, March 8, 2023.