Good point. However to me it still just seems terribly wasteful/stupid. Considering the aux battery in most computing devices, couldn't the musical thingie be embedded into the computer itself?
> It is completely irrelevant, ecologically speaking.
How so? It makes the box unrecyclable; worse still, as soon as such an item is detected in the recycling plant it will often cause the whole batch of material to be rejected and dumped[1].
No-one has time to pick-through cardboard removing batteries and circuitry.
[1] Source: anecdote from a colleague who worked in a 'recyclarium'. Contaminated material causes the line to be stopped, batch dumped and machines cleaned.
The actual pre-processing sorting is quite fascinating, using spectrometers to detect the type of materials.
From one of the comments above: "It's not the box, but a small plastic enclosure"
And while I sympathise, consider that this is part of packaging for a computer, where the manufacture of the computer itself will consume many times as many resources, and the power to use the computer over its lifetime will consume many times as many resources. With respect to the overall environmental impact of the purchase of that device, the inclusion of a device like that will be a rounding error.
It's not really an excuse to waste more resources though. Saying "this only wastes a tiny amount of resources compared to this other thing" isn't justification to waste it anyway.
