Costco dress shirt is a recycling challenge

Costco Wholesale sells cotton shirts in button-down and open-color styles, but you'll have to remove soft and hard plastic, cardboard, paper, pins and string before you wear one, below.

If you're in a rush, you might want to leave your new Costco Wholesale dress shirt for another occasion.

You'll need several minutes to remove all the plastic, cardboard, paper, string and pins apparently needed to keep the shirt folded and in shape during its long journey from Indonesia.

Without using a small scissor, I still haven't figured out how to remove a string attached to a folded, black cardboard tag that hides two spare collar stays.

The string is wrapped so tightly around a button, it can't be removed by hand.

The price can't be beat: only $17.99. 

But if I thought Costco's packaging of 2, 3 or 4 items -- such as milk, juice and catsup -- produced a lot of recycling, this dress shirt holds its own. 

Once you have the shirt on, what do you do with all the packing material?

One shirt produces a lot of waste.

The light cardboard and tissue paper goes into the recycling can with junk mail, paper bags and so forth.

The flexible, printed plastic and pliable plastic under the collar goes with recyclable plastic grocery bags, which likely will be blowing around after our civilization has been wiped out.

I keep the pins and add them to a divided container with safety pins and collar stays.

The Kirkland Signature fabric band around the shirt? The string? Beats me.

The black fabric band seems over the top.