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About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

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Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#161

Post by Lukas_Skywalker »

ryandrake wrote: post #132
pinot wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In parent's defense, every city has different rules sometimes different recycling vendors within a city. They rarely communicate these rules in an effective and routine manner.

I don't think I've ever understood the "what goes in recycling, what goes in organics" rules in any place I've ever lived. It's a total unknown. I put stuff in whatever bin makes intuitive sense and the man in the truck takes it away. Until either 1. the rules are explained in a sensible way or 2. the city starts fining me for putting something in the wrong bin, my behavior is not going to change.

In Switzerland, recycling is done by the city administration. Put things in the wrong bin, get fined (and quite aggressively so). Instructions are sent to you when you move into the city and every year to every household. Works really well [1] (recycling rates: Glass 95%, aluminium 90%, paper 90%, plastic bottles 80%, batteries 70%). Also, no landfills at all, everything is burned, air is filtered and heat is used for heating.

[1] http://www.bafu.admin.ch/umwelt/indikatoren/08484/08653/inde...

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#162

Post by jmharvey »

kogepathic wrote: post #158
akanet wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"Yes in my back yard." It's a group that advocates for building more housing in San Francisco.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#163

Post by mirimir »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #115
mirimir wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Amazon seems to have no clue about shipping HDDs. Especially OEM HDDs. They have come loose, in a huge box, in just thin plastic "cases", embedded in air pockets. Which had been pounded flat in transit. New Egg, in contrast, shipped HDDs with molded cardboard padding (as I recall).

I've rarely buy from NewEgg, so I don't know how their return policy works, but for Amazon, if I ordered a hard drive and it was DOA, I tell them and they send me a new one before I even ship the first one back. No RMA numbers, no warranty problems, no "it was fine when it shipped, so that's UPS' fault". A simple "defective or doesn't work" and a new one is shipped that day.

Sure, Amazon does make returns effortless. But there are two complications. First, DOA is not really a problem. Second, it seems that Amazon nukes accounts that return too much stuff. Or so I've read. So if you order many HDDs from Amazon, you're faced with many decisions about borderline poor packaging.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#164

Post by morsch »

gumby wrote: post #157
hueving wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 cuttin…

Conventional wisdom is that recycled paper uses less resources than new paper.

https://archive.epa.gov/wastes/conserve/materials/paper/web/...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_recycling

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#165

Post by kgwgk »

Lukas_Skywalker wrote: post #161
ryandrake wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I've ever understood the "what goes in recycling, what goes in organics" rules in any place I've ever lived. It's a total unknown. I put stuff in whatever bin makes intuitive sense and the man in the truck takes it away. Until either 1. the rules are explained in a sensible way or 2. the city starts fining me for putting something in the wrong bin, my behavior is not going to change.

In Switzerland, recycling is done by the city administration. Put things in the wrong bin, get fined (and quite aggressively so). Instructions are sent to you when you move into the city and every year to every household. Works really well [1] (recycling rates: Glass 95%, aluminium 90%, paper 90%, plastic bottles 80%, batteries 70%). Also, no landfills at all, everything is burned, air is filtered and heat is used fo…

> no landfills at all, everything is burned

Only combustible waste is burned. Landfills are still needed.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#166

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

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…

The city just has to say "put all your soft plastics in a larger soft plastic bag for easier sorting at the other end" or "take your soft plastics to the supermarket and put them in the soft-plastics bin there".

Do everything to make it easy at both ends.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#167

Post by janeandrews »

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Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#168

Post by abalone »

Lukas_Skywalker wrote: post #161
ryandrake wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I've ever understood the "what goes in recycling, what goes in organics" rules in any place I've ever lived. It's a total unknown. I put stuff in whatever bin makes intuitive sense and the man in the truck takes it away. Until either 1. the rules are explained in a sensible way or 2. the city starts fining me for putting something in the wrong bin, my behavior is not going to change.

In Switzerland, recycling is done by the city administration. Put things in the wrong bin, get fined (and quite aggressively so). Instructions are sent to you when you move into the city and every year to every household. Works really well [1] (recycling rates: Glass 95%, aluminium 90%, paper 90%, plastic bottles 80%, batteries 70%). Also, no landfills at all, everything is burned, air is filtered and heat is used fo…

The recycling rates are great, but even with perfect filtering there's a serious issue with burning trash. Namely, CO2.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#169

Post by anexprogrammer »

gumby wrote: post #152
anexprogrammer wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting. I wasn't aware there was quite so much liquor (by weight) created from paper production. It does seem like they get most of their energy from it now they don't just dump it in rivers.

Recycled changes the numbers too if you don't need to bleach it back to white. Though you've a load of ink and finishers to deal with. At least paper is regularly recycled.

So I think we're in agreement that we don't know!

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#170

Post by ritchiea »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #166
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…

The city just has to say "put all your soft plastics in a larger soft plastic bag for easier sorting at the other end" or "take your soft plastics to the supermarket and put them in the soft-plastics bin there". Do everything to make it easy at both ends.

Don't recyclers have to sort submissions anyway? It's expected that citizens will fail to completely adhere to recycling instructions and submissions must be sorted anyway.
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