I needed a few 18650s, so I ordered them from China.  They arrived, and I thought I’d share some of the entertainment of unpacking them.

International battery shipping regulations are a bit odd - so all of this is to meet those requirements.

They show up in an awful lot of boxes.

Read on for the rest of the photos…

Each box is clearly labeled as lithium batteries - and, curiously, “Overpack.”  What’s Overpack?

Ah.  This is overpack.  The outer box has a lot of smaller boxes inside - each individually labeled!

Each small box has two batteries and some padding material.  The batteries are individually bagged.

Remove the boxes and packing materials, and you have a pile of batteries in bags!

This is the remains of one box worth of packing materials.  Very, very well packed.

After removing the batteries from bags, you end up with a pile of batteries.

Which then get loaded into one box for more compact storage.

Do that a couple times, and you’ve got a box full of batteries!

It’s really a bit silly, but shipping regulations are what they are, and I certainly can’t complain about how these were shipped!