Green packaging is here, and it's here to stay. And that's definitely good thing. As much as we all love having that giant wooden crate dropped off to our front porch, it can be expensive and a bit wasteful. Smaller packaging that doesn't require a crowbar to open saves money, time, and best of all, the environment.

Of course, none of this is news to Dell. For years, they've worked hard to develop efficient packaging for their computers and peripherals. Even back in 2007, when "green" was little more than a waxy crayon in the ol' Crayola box, Dell was going green.

For example, this 2007 order for mounting screws, would have traditionally required an entire fleet of semi-trucks to deliver; but Dell was able to reduce the packaging footprint to several foam padded boxes.







A little more than a year later, they were applying the same cost-saving packaging concepts to CMOS batteries. Prior to that, most vendors were using a courier with an aluminum briefcase handcuffed to his wrist to ensure safe and sound delivery of the coin-sized batteries.

Most would have never even imagined such packaging efficiencies were possible. Even dreamers believed that Dell had achieved packaging nirvana, and there simply was no more room for improvement. But leave it to Dell to impress us once again. Martin Ørding-Thomsen was one of the very first to see Dell's brand-new screw distribution system: a big box containing 65 padded envelopes, each containing a little plastic bag, each containing one tiny screw.

Now if that's not green, then I don't know what is.