Worst egg cartons, ever.

While I generally like Japan and don't have too many complaints, there is one thing that is really terrible here: the design of the egg cartons.

Now, you may be asking "But Sarah, how can an egg carton be terrible?" this is perhaps because you're used to the egg cartons in North America¹ that are made out of fairly rigid, easily recycled or composted cardboard that maintain their shape. The kind of egg cartons that can be easily opened and closed again and again. The kind of egg cartons that are unlikely to spill all of your eggs out all over the place if you aren't careful. These are not those kinds of egg cartons.


Egg cartons in Japan tend to be made of plastic, as shown below.

This particular one is PET plastic, the only kind I'm sure gets recycled here.

There may be non-plastic egg cartons around here, but I have not seen them. Anyway, one thing which might not be immediately obvious from that picture is how to open the egg carton. In theory, this is quite simple. You simply grab this thing:

Yes, the thing with the yellow writing.

And you pull it. In principle, what's supposed to happen is that the entire strip joining the top and bottom of the egg carton should separate and you can open your egg carton.

What typically happens instead is that the plastic strip breaks after a few centimetres. Then you have to reach partly into the egg carton, past the now jagged perforated edges of the top and bottom and pull again. Sometimes this procedure must be repeated three or four times along the length of the entire egg carton. This can sometimes result in plastic cuts (think paper cuts, but made with a thin sheet of plastic).

Not that you necessarily want to open the entire egg carton at once. Indeed, what you might notice is that there's no little flap that allows you to close the egg carton again once it's open. In addition, the plastic becomes very flimsy when the two halves are separated and the egg carton will bend under the weight of the eggs. Thus, it is entirely possible that opening the entire egg carton might lead to all of the contents of this egg carton spilling out everywhere.

The other option involves opening the egg carton past the first or second row of eggs initially and painstakingly pulling the eggs out as necessary, squeezing them out of the opening you've made. As you use more and more eggs, you can peel back more plastic and eventually it becomes less annoying to deal with, but that doesn't really make the design any better.

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^{1. Apologies to any readers who are not from North America, I do not know what the egg cartons are like elsewhere.↩}