Dewalt has officially announced their new Tough Series tape measures, which are said to be extra-durable and capable of surviving drops of up to 100 feet onto packed soil.
Side note: I picked one up at the local Home Depot – please let me know if you have any questions as I work on the review.
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In addition to announcing the new tapes, Dewalt has also announced that they will be packaging the new tape measures using new sustainable packaging.
If you look at other Stanley, Stanley FatMax, and Dewalt tape measures on the shelves at Home Depot and other retailers, you’ll noticed a fair amount of plastic used in the packaging materials.
Some brands’ tape measures use more plastic than others, while Stanley Black & Decker brands tend to use a combination of card stock and plastic.
With the new Dewalt Tough Series tape measures, the company sought to reduce the amount of plastic packaging that would eventually enter the waste stream.
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Dewalt says that by implementing a new eco-friendly clip-card design, they will be eliminating 10,000 pounds of PVC per year. They say this is the equivalent amount of plastic as 400,000 0.5 liter water bottles.
That’s a huge reduction in plastic that is unlikely to ever be recycled.
This is all part of a Dewalt pledge to make all of their packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025.
The all-cardboard packaging did stand out to me when I picked up a Tough Series 25′ tape, but I didn’t realize this was part of a new initiative.
Read More About Dewalt Tough Series Tape Measures
Buy Now: 25′ via Home Depot
Buy Now: 16′ via Home Depot
Buy Now: 35′ via Home Depot
Discussion
Sounds good to me. The packaging still requires a cutting tool to liberate the tape measures from their retail packaging. but the entire package is made from recyclable cardboard and paper cardstock.
*Thumbs up* to Dewalt and Stanley Black & Decker, this sounds like a great initiative to me.
I wouldn’t be quick to assume that Stanley Black & Decker will use the same style of packaging for their other lines of Stanley and Dewalt tape measures. If you look closely at the above photos, the new Dewalt tapes don’t pack as densely on the shelf, which lets the cardboard packaging take up more space.
But, SBD and Dewalt have their waste-reduction pledge with a 2025 goal, and so it seems we’re bound to see more packaging changes over the next few years.
Will
F*** plastic packaging.
Jammer
Yup
jorn
Hear hear!
Sunny leveson-jones
lower costs, less crappy packaging, less space taken, unless you own a plastic packaging plant sounds good to me
Ball_bearing
Measuring tapes could be held on a stand or shelf similar to the ones used for deodorants in/on the drug store. The barcode can be printed directly on the tool label and the anti theft device placed inside the shell. If they do something like that, then there is no need for extra packaging material.
MM
I agree completely. Some products need packaging. A tape measure is not one of them.
The Grippe
Tape rule “shrinkage” makes them among the most stolen items at the big box stores. The makers don’t want bulletproof packaging, the retailers insist on it.
Ex_dtw2003
Just make it from recycle-able plastic and then recycle it. I’m not some wokester but seriously people, recycle. (Excludes plastic grocery bags. Those should be reused and then pitched.)
Ex_dtw2003
Edit: Yes, less packaging by mass, recycle-able or otherwise, is always better.
Frank D
Most recyclable materials don’t get recycled. 90% of the people I know and see, throw everything goes in the trash. Then some materials that are shown as recyclable on the box or bag in terms of plastics, food packaging, … don’t get recycled either.
fred
For so many localities in the USA – recycling plastic is probably more myth than reality. At 2 of my residences the local sanitation has recycle pickup – but everything (paper, plastic, metal, glass) seems to get jumbled together into the truck – and we all suspect that it just goes to the landfill. In one place – they do a separate collection for lawn and garden waste – so I have some hope about that. At the place where we bring our recyclables to the trash facility ourselves – they do ask that you sort plastics by code # , separate glass by color and bundle paper separately – but I understand that the market (it may have been China) has fallen out for paper and plastics – so lately those get incinerated
Kent Skinner
Plastic doesn’t really recycle. I know it sounds all sorts of crazy lefty but it has been shown that “plastic recycling” was developed by the plastic producers to convince us that plastic is easily recyclable. Since it isn’t, and it’s cheaper to make new plastic than the buy recycled plastic, the plastics companies get more money and we feel good about thinking we are recycling.
A W
The problem with plastic in North America is that we don’t have the recycling capacity to actually do that on this continent.
So the choice comes down to putting it in a local landfill where I know it will be properly treated and sealed, or putting it on a boat to Asia where I hope that it won’t get dumped overboard or just turned into a trash heap in Indonesia.
NPR did an excellent expose on this issue a couple years ago, but I stopped believing in the environmental value of plastic recycling a few years before that when newspapers reported that China was shipping container ships full of recycling back to California. Trying to help the environment by expending a large amount of carbon to take my my recycling by train to the West coast and from there across the ocean to a factory in Asia just doesn’t make sense.
A W
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-should-we-recycle
A W
All of that to say, I applaud SBDs approach of reducing the amount of plastic in the distribution chain. This will be far more effective than just telling people to recycle more.
MM
It’s not just “recycling capacity”, it’s also the unfortunate but undeniable fact that some forms of recycling are counterproductive because they consume more resources and/or generate more pollution than they save.
For example, consider paper recycling. Every papermill in the country recycles its own waste back into its own process because it’s simply more efficient that way–transportation costs are zero and the purity of the material is known. But very little post-consumer paper honestly ends up being recycled because we can’t figure out a good way to keep the oil and grease out. A single greasy pizza box or a couple napkins can ruin an entire shipping container’s worth of otherwise recyclable paper, and public paper recycle bins get crammed with an awful lot of that kind of thing. Even though we might desire to recycle it, the effort of collecting it, trucking it to where it needs to go, sorting out the contaminants, actually processing it, disposing of the byproduct waste, etc, ends up costing more energy and/or generating more pollution than it saves.
Industry wants to recycle and does so whenever it’s practical on their own accord because it saves the company money, and this is not a new concept. Henry Ford was famous for using wood scraps from making car parts as well as shipping crates from incoming goods to fuel steam engines and heaters in his plants, as well as for making the Kingsford brand of charcoal. Whenever people aren’t recycling there’s usually a valid technical reason why–the process just isn’t good enough for whatever reason. When recycling makes sense people are willing to buy your waste from you: farmers and gardeners buy manure and compost, landscapers buy wood chips and mulch, cement plants buy old tires, scrapyards pay cash for aluminum cans, copper wire, lead batteries, steel scrap, chips/swarf from machining, and so on. Many places will buy or offer trade-in credit for electronics devices like smartphones, tablets, and gaming consoles. If someone isn’t willing to pay you for your waste then it’s a good assumption it will either never be recycled, or it will be “recycled” in a manner which harms the earth more than it helps.
Jack Smith
I’ve tried to convince my wife of this and she does not believe me. She throws anything with that recycle symbol and actually believes that they are going to actually recycle it. Oh well I guess it saves room in our regular dumpster. They are not going to hand sort everything because there’s too much.
It doesn’t even matter if cardboard and paper go into the landfill. Paper is a completely renewable resource and we grow those trees like a crop. The paper and cardboard turns back into dirt and doesn’t pollute.
I would say paper products are the most environmentally friendly disposable packaging. We are always going to have trash that goes into the landfill and paper has to be the least harmful thing we could use.
Reusable packaging is probably the best way to go but that’s not possible on everything.
Nathan
indeed less is more.
meanwhile I think we can all agree that we were lied to about recycling decades ago. It’s taken this long to come out but all that “recycling” that was done wasn’t actually recycled.
Wayne R.
This should be, I hope, a form of “precycling”, where re-use is easy and essentially guaranteed. Like aluminum cans, easy, as low-problem as can be with no generational degradation of the material is the ideal.
Rather than recycling being the responsibility of the end user, it should start at the point of origin so that nothing enters the “stream” that the factories aren’t eager to have come back. Such regulation would be an ideal role for national governments in a far less imperfect world.
I’m hoping that, some day, advanced robotics will make landfills the high value “gold mines” of the future. But before that, the waste streams should get a lot smaller…
scott taylor
Plastic packaging helps when you have to send it from china. If it is sealed water is not a problem.
IronWood
Kudos to SBD for trying to stem the plastic tide a bit. It’s about time, and I’m all for it.
Stanislaw Lem wrote in 1971 that modern civilization “strives for the production of commodities as impermanent as possible in packaging as permanent as possible.” Pretty well sums up the last 50 years… Any reversal of that would be most welcome.
I might go buy a Tough Series Tape that I don’t need just to “vote with my wallet” as they say.
Jack Smith
It won’t affect my purchasing decisions, because I’m getting the product that I prefer regardless. I do think all cardboard is the way to go.
It really doesn’t matter that much if you throw the cardboard in the trash as far as the environment. Paper products are non toxic and completely biodegradable, it turns to dirt.
It is also completely renewable. The trees that are used for paper and cardboard are not from old growth forests. They grow these fast growing trees just like growing a crop. They cut them down, process them and plant another one in its place, so they can keep doing it over and over again.