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About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

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Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#151

Post by corecoder »

akanet wrote: post #144
developer2 wrote: post #119

> frustrated customers on forums discussing how many air-filled cushions they were getting > while deflated air cushions can be recycled, many cities won’t collect them curbside Pop them, put them in recycling. It's plastic, it's not my job to deal with the fallout. Either it's recyclable and I've done all I can, or it's the retailers' or cities' problem. The idea that there are "frustrated customers" is beyond me. I…

This is very irresponsible. The reason soft plastics are unrecyclable curbside in San Francisco is that they pose a very real danger to the machines that do recycling sorting. This is possible to overcome with greater manual filtering of recyclable materials, but Recology currently does not have the funds for it. Putting soft plastics in curbside recycling at the moment does nothing but make recycling worse for every…

Doesn't this just mean that the machines were chosen unwisely?

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#152

Post by gumby »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #139
gumby wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here in the UK Amazon seems to have switched solely to paper inner packaging. Environmentally I prefer this. It's not clear to me you should (perhaps you should, the balance simply isn't clear to me). A plastic air cushion weighs almost nothing, so shipping it to the merchant and then to you uses almost no fuel. It is rarely recycled but instead become sequestered carbon in a landfill. For me, they are convenient t…

You may be right. I don't have answers. I'm not sure anyone does. I've often wished it were easier to see all the externalities and environmental issues in our stuff. So I can make decisions with my eyes open. I think it's likely we're making many poor choices for the right reasons at the moment. I'd be surprised if unbleached brown paper, screwed up as padding, came out worse environmentally than oil derived plastic…

> I'd be surprised if unbleached brown paper, screwed up as padding, came out worse environmentally than oil derived plastic.

I would not be surprised; the production even of unbleached Kraft paper is quite energy intensive and environmentally bad (look up "black liquor" for example). Oil derived plastics (not very nice either by any stretch of the imagination) appear to use less energy to produce and of course much much less to transport.

> It's probably polythene or variant which doesn't really biodegrade and lasts for centuries. Or leaches chemicals or ends up in the ocean and photodegrades to little bits.

PE doesn't really biodegrade in any meaningful sense of the word. But if stuck in the ground it doesn't release any more carbon into the atmosphere, unlike decaying organic matter. Typical PE film doesn't contain interesting plasticisers so there's nothing to leach out.

The nasty end result of PE film is when it flies about and gets eaten by animals. That's why plastic bags are so horrible. I don't know if these air bags suffer the same fate; I suspect they do. That's bad.

But you said "envoronmentally" not just waste stream: when I look at the total life cycle it's not clear to me that paper is better.

Note that if oil were only involved as feedstock (so both products were produced with only wind or solar electricity) then the calculus could be different.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#153

Post by tonyedgecombe »

developer2 wrote: post #119

> frustrated customers on forums discussing how many air-filled cushions they were getting > while deflated air cushions can be recycled, many cities won’t collect them curbside Pop them, put them in recycling. It's plastic, it's not my job to deal with the fallout. Either it's recyclable and I've done all I can, or it's the retailers' or cities' problem. The idea that there are "frustrated customers" is beyond me. I…

Yes, really if you are worried about the environmental impact you shouldn't hit the buy button in the first place.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#154

Post by tcdent »

cperciva wrote: post #3

I haven't seen any of these for years -- my Amazon packages always come with crumpled paper keeping things in place. Now I'm curious; does Amazon use different packaging in different locations? (I'm in BC, Canada.)

In Los Angeles a large majority of our holiday packages had one or more newer (to me) "bubble wrap" sheets instead of the Sealed Air pouches made from two 15"x15" sheets of a thicker plastic film sealed into 2" spheres (dimensions approximate).

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#155

Post by akanet »

corecoder wrote: post #151
akanet wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very irresponsible. The reason soft plastics are unrecyclable curbside in San Francisco is that they pose a very real danger to the machines that do recycling sorting. This is possible to overcome with greater manual filtering of recyclable materials, but Recology currently does not have the funds for it. Putting soft plastics in curbside recycling at the moment does nothing but make recycling worse for every…

Doesn't this just mean that the machines were chosen unwisely?

There's more to it than machine choice, there's also process surrounding the machines. The current process probably assumes a certain compliance rate of people "not putting soft plastic in the bin". In so much as we are citizens who don't want to endanger the recycling process, I believe we have at least a mild ethical duty to at least not knowingly do just that.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#156

Post by akanet »

an_account wrote: post #148
akanet wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very irresponsible. The reason soft plastics are unrecyclable curbside in San Francisco is that they pose a very real danger to the machines that do recycling sorting. This is possible to overcome with greater manual filtering of recyclable materials, but Recology currently does not have the funds for it. Putting soft plastics in curbside recycling at the moment does nothing but make recycling worse for every…

There are plenty of cities that do soft plastic recycling. I'm surprised San Fransisco doesn't.

SF has a very high diversion percentage (waste that doesn't go to landfull). I'm not sure what tradeoffs go into getting that number, but I do absolutely recommend going on one of the free Recology tours. We went on a tour a few months ago as part of the SF YIMBY infrastructure tour series (shameless plug) and I had a great time.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#157

Post by gumby »

hueving wrote: post #116
gumby wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here in the UK Amazon seems to have switched solely to paper inner packaging. Environmentally I prefer this. It's not clear to me you should (perhaps you should, the balance simply isn't clear to me). A plastic air cushion weighs almost nothing, so shipping it to the merchant and then to you uses almost no fuel. It is rarely recycled but instead become sequestered carbon in a landfill. For me, they are convenient t…

>and involves cutting down trees Which they plant more of. Using this as an argument against paper is silly because it only applies to unsustainable approaches to paper. If we judged every process by the worst way to do it, then no process would be acceptable.

I'm not sure what your point is here.

The whole point of recycling paper is to avoid cutting down trees (and as a minor secondary point reduce landfill, though most paper is compostable). Paper recycling is quite energy and chemical intensive when compared to virgin paper production. If you want to talk about "sustainable" and consider planting trees to be fine, then you don't want to recycle.

I don't consider cutting down trees and replanting them that great, frankly. You take a large tree with a large surface area that's transpiring lots of carbon and replace it with a sapling with a small surface area. Yes that sapling is, over time, turning carbon into tree trunk, but that time scale for that is decades while the paper releases carbon immediately through its production and transport and then continues to do so over decades as it decomposes.

This calculus can be improved by making the paper out of something with a better yield and shorter growth time (hemp is claimed to be such but I have no idea if that's true) and by using non-fossil fuel. But you have to look at the chemistry required as well...and in any case paper is heavy (a box of paper is basically a box of wood) which is inherently fuel intensive.

Plastic film (and plastic toys) are sequestered if you can stick them in landfills. Of course the best carbon sequestration will be to leave the oil in the ground...not yet an option in 2017.

But the best lifecycle analysis has to be done on base of most accurate costs possible, not emotion. Paper is pretty shitty.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#158

Post by kogepathic »

akanet wrote: post #156
an_account wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of cities that do soft plastic recycling. I'm surprised San Fransisco doesn't.

SF has a very high diversion percentage (waste that doesn't go to landfull). I'm not sure what tradeoffs go into getting that number, but I do absolutely recommend going on one of the free Recology tours. We went on a tour a few months ago as part of the SF YIMBY infrastructure tour series (shameless plug) and I had a great time.

YIMBY? Your infrastructure my back yard?

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#159

Post by 9erdelta »

If Amazon made it so that you can drop boxes and packing material off a lockers, I would do it. Definitely a first world problem, but yeah the boxes and packing material backing up my garage is getting out of hand. The materials are in pristine condition and it feels so wasteful to pop/crush them.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#160

Post by kbart »

krapp wrote: post #17

I had to package and tape boxes at an Amazon fulfillment center over peak season one day. One of the "problems" I found with the process is the system tells you the size of box to use. You're not allowed to use a smaller size, even if it would work, only that size or larger. It also tends to overestimate the size of the item, so many boxes wind up with a lot more empty space than would be necessary, and more packing.…

Amazon, in particular, sends packages in ridiculously oversized boxes. I've received kitchen knife from Amazon that was packed in a box more than twice the size of a shoebox. Literary hundreds of same items would have fitted there. On the bright note, it was padded with recycled paper, not plastic.
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