Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2021-02-17 18:29
prigault wrote:
> - the plastic casing is great to physically protect each reed
> and prevent warping, while allowing grouping/transport in the
> most convenient way.
The plastic holders do nothing, as far as I can see, to prevent warping. Cane can warp within those holders. I've gotten warped reeds out of the box occasionally. And I've sometimes found the plastic holders to be slightly bent, even though the reeds in them were still somehow flat. The tips IMO are equally well protected from being broken in the paper/cardboard holders that reeds like Steuer, Aria, Leuthner, Pilgerstorfer and others are shipped in. Those holders group/transport as well as the plastic, maybe even a little more compactly.
> the individual flow-pack wrapping to preserve humidity is a
> lifesaver for those living in humidity challenged areas (these
> days humidity is about 25% inside homes in Quebec where I live,
> and in six months it will be 75-80%),
Fortunately (I think), I live in a much more moderate climate near Philadelphia, although the indoor relative humidity *can* go as low as 20% in winter without a humidifier running in the room or the house. I've never seen our summer indoor humidity level ever go as high as 80%, so I guess I can count myself as lucky. But, regardless of how much ambient moisture there is in your environment, the reeds will have to function in that humidity level as soon as you open the flow-pack. That might be as drastic as flying through space in an environmentally controlled space ship to Mars and then just opening the hatch and jumping out with no breathing equipment onto the Martian rocks. The flow-packs' protection has only gotten the reeds to you. They give no functional benefit once the packaging is opened. From there, you and the reeds have to deal with your local atmosphere, not the one in France they came from. Whether you maintain a constant humidity with humidipacks or simply wet them for a longer time in dry weather, the reeds aren't in Paris anymore - regardless of how they were packaged on arrival.
> Wasteful IMO would be Amazon shipping a box to you with lots of
> bubble wrap and within a large cardboard box (which they often
> do).
>
Agreed! Why do they do that?
> If one is so concerned as to classify anything temporally
> limited as waste, should those who recently offered a bunch of
> flowers for Valentine's day feel guilty for using the plastic
> equivalent of a few years of flow-packs for flowers that last a
> fraction of a reed's life ?
>
Well, first, if you account for the reeds in a given box of Vandorens that will never see useful life as reeds (because they're not playable), I don't know if this equivalence even holds. But the plastic holders would be a far smaller problem if they were universally recyclable. Meanwhile, there's no good reason that I can see why the cardboard holders that so many other reed manufacturers use aren't a viable solution. They're far better than the way Vandorens and most other reeds were boxed 50 years ago - lying loose in layers separated by paper. Once Vandoren moved to the narrow boxes of 10 with the septum in the center, they even dispensed with the paper separators with a piece of Styrofoam jammed into the top of the box to hold everything in place.
In any case, these are, IMO, two separate issues, the foil flow-packs and the plastic holders. The problem of the plastic holders can be resolved easily enough. The individual foil packaging is, I think, a nuisance that is a non-solution to what is for many of us a non-problem.
Karl
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