May 12, 2008 - Dell has responded to a barrage of blogger complaints by pledging to work with its vendors on designing more resource-efficient product packaging.

The company was hit with an Earth Day pileup from blogs including Consumerist, Gizmodo, and Y2Kers, whose writers slammed the company for shipping a tiny flash drive in an outsized cardboard box.

Writing on Dell's official blog last week, Todd Dwyer, the company's community liaison on environmental issues, said small items will be shipped in envelopes instead of boxes, effective immediately. Dell is working with the offending flash-drive supplier to improve packaging practices and will include "volumetric metrics on void space" in product packaging in its evaluation of all vendors moving forward, according to Dwyer.

"While third party items such as these make up a very small portion of our overall shipping volume, folks here know we need to fix it," he wrote. "Our sincere gratitude goes out to everyone who pointed this irregularity out to us."

Customers have been invited to air their complaints on Ideastorm, Dell's online idea forum.

Dell has made itself something of a popular target for environmental complaints, famously announcing its intention to become the "greenest technology company in the world."