Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 236 posts

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#171

Post by test1235 »

ritchiea wrote: post #170
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Throwing your plastic bags into recycling because "it'll get sorted anyway" is as bad as throwing your litter on the ground because "we pay people to clean the streets anyway"

You're just playing NIMBY by passing the responsibility on.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#173

Post by test1235 »

briandear wrote: post #69
pedalpete wrote: post #68

I think there are two opportunities for the environmental effects of the air cushions. 1) Re-use rather than recycle: What if you could let the air out at home, open up the bag, stuff it with other bags, and the outside of the bag had a postage paid stamp. It goes back to the company that made the bag so it can be re-used. 2) Make them out of compostable plastic. Much simpler than above, probably the better way. The…

Mailing bags back? What's the transit cost of doing that?

or the environmental cost of shipping them all around

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#174

Post by bkor »

phil21 wrote: post #67
niij wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure your environmental impact of having food delivered to your door by a courier is much greater than a single box anyway.

Depends. A single delivery truck running a route for 20 customers is a heck of a lot more environmentally friendly than those 20 customers driving a car each to the store to load up.

It's more environmentally friendly to not drive. In Netherlands it's common to have a supermarket very close to your home (walking distance). Else you use a bike. A car is when you have a family and then you'd stock up for a week of supplies.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#175

Post by timthorn »

abalone wrote: post #168
Lukas_Skywalker wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's better than methane from letting it decompose in landfill, plus you get energy out.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#176

Post by abalone »

timthorn wrote: post #175
abalone wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's better than methane from letting it decompose in landfill, plus you get energy out.

That depends on how much biomass goes to landfill but a good composting/recycling program can sort a lot of that out. Furthermore, landfill methane can be captured and repurposed.[1]

Seriously, burning stuff is not good. We need to stop doing that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_gas_utilization

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#177

Post by MandieD »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #43

Easy solution: require companies that produce waste products to also fashion a waste recovery arm. Force them to build externalities into their business models from the get go. I'm sure they'll figure out the most efficient way to manage it.

Companies have to pre-pay their packaging disposal costs in Germany, either by making things deposit (bottles and some glass jars) or paying the costs outright (which gets them a little recycling symbol). Easy way to see the difference: yoghurt containers - fairly hefty plastic in the USA, almost eggshell-like plastic or deposit glass jars in Germany. Eggs come in cardboard, never styrofoam.

The only common seriously durable, non-deposit packaging around here are glass bottles and metal cans, as both of those things are easy and profitable to sort and recycle.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#178

Post by gutnor »

test1235 wrote: post #171
ritchiea wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Throwing your plastic bags into recycling because "it'll get sorted anyway" is as bad as throwing your litter on the ground because "we pay people to clean the streets anyway" You're just playing NIMBY by passing the responsibility on.

On the other hand where do you put the limit on what is a acceptable burden ?

Here are the rules for recycling where I lived: plastic to be cleaned before recycling (a minimal trace of food, allegedly, would require the whole batch of plastic to be thrown away). You are also supposed to separate the plastic part from the cardboard part on the packaging. You are also supposed to check if there is a specific type of coating on the inside of a cardboard box like foil for milk or wax for cups. Metal, Glass need to be cleaned too, although without threat of discarding a ton of waste. Paper is recycled separately from cardboard, however I believe that was for operational rather than technical reasons. Recycled paper could not be recycled again and glassy paper (magazine covers) needed removal.

When you get to that stage you realise that the average product in the supermarket would require quite a lot of processing. That's not realistic to expect people to follow all those rules and if you rely on thousands or ten of thousands of people to comply with them in order for your recycling to work, you are deep in the designed to fail territory.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#179

Post by cm2187 »

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.

There is an obvious irony to having to go to your supermarket to recycle the plastic bags you received by shopping online, i.e. by not having to go to your supermarket to do shopping...

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#180

Post by akanet »

gutnor wrote: post #178
test1235 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwing your plastic bags into recycling because "it'll get sorted anyway" is as bad as throwing your litter on the ground because "we pay people to clean the streets anyway" You're just playing NIMBY by passing the responsibility on.

On the other hand where do you put the limit on what is a acceptable burden ? Here are the rules for recycling where I lived: plastic to be cleaned before recycling (a minimal trace of food, allegedly, would require the whole batch of plastic to be thrown away). You are also supposed to separate the plastic part from the cardboard part on the packaging. You are also supposed to check if there is a specific type of co…

These are currently the rules in San Francisco and we do pretty well on the whole!

You know, it's interesting that you say that we can't expect people to follow all those rules, but I just got back from Japan and WOW. That country has basically gotten everyone on board with following every rule. There are like four different receptacles for trash and you have to walk all your own trash out to the proper drop point. It seems like a crazy complex system, but the people understand why it has to be that way (no landfill space) and why their civic duty matters.

Post reply on HN