Laser printers are sensitive electrical-mechanical devices.  The packaging's primary purpose is to protect product quality as the product moves from the factory to the final customer.  That journey from factory to customer typically stretches thousands of miles, over land, ocean, and air.  The bag plays an important role.  It protects the product from dust and moisture in the air, and scratches on the product that can happen during handling.

At HP, product bags are called simply that, bags.  The bags are typically made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE) film or low-density polyethylene (LDPE) film.  Both materials are recyclable.  Customer access to recycling infrastructure varies from city-to-city.  Some cities provide curbside recycling of PE films.  In addition, some national retailers provide bag recycling collection at their stores.

Packaging helps to protect the quality of your purchase.  At HP, we also strive to reduce the environmental impact of the packaging on our products.  HP's packaging engineering community has a packaging environmental strategy built on three tenants; reduce the amount of packaging material used wherever possible, make product packaging as small as possible to improve shipping efficiency, and use recycled content in packaging where it can provide good performance and is readily available.  

Each year, HP includes some of the highlights of packaging environmental improvements in HP's Sustainable Impact Report.  You can view the latest report at http://www.hp.com/go/report