This Dyson vacuum comes in 3 pounds of packaging. This includes more than a dozen separate elaborately cut-and-folded pieces of corrugated cardboard. (The cutouts mean that the amount of cardboard that was consumed in producing the packaging was even greater.)

The packaging also includes the following note (on that black paper in the middle):

To reduce our environmental impact, we’ve moved your full manual online.

I weighed the full printed manuals that came with two other vacuums, and each was just half an ounce. That’s 1% of the weight of the packaging here. From the picture here, does it look like Dyson has gotten the packing cardboard to within 1% of the minimum needed to protect the product during shipment?

I’m beginning to suspect that this “environmental impact” business is a pretext for something else….