Reducing waste is a key part of what we do at Virage. Home automation can be used to remind you to close your windows when the AC or heat is on, it can turn off lights when no one is there, or let you control the temperature in your home or business more intelligently. So, apart from just being cool, automating your home or business can conserve energy, save money, and reduce emissions from generation (even green energy can have some emissions, or can be used to displace emissions somewhere else).
We apply the same philosophy to our packaging. While packaging is necessary to protect products from damage before they get to the end user, it’s clear that electronics are often over packaged. Where we can, we direct our suppliers to omit excess packaging in shipping us raw products, particularly plastics and foam, to minimize the waste we generate.
Nearly all Virage consumer packaging is biodegradable, and we don’t shrink-wrap our boxes in plastic or use foam liners. Where possible, we use recycled (and/or recyclable) packing materials to protect devices inside of our boxes, and we have designed our product and shipping boxes to fit precisely inside one another to minimize the need for plastic bubbles or other ‘space filling’ packing materials.
Rather than include printed instructions in our packaging, we have also chosen to provide instructions for our products in digital form only, downloadable from our web site.