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About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

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Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#211

Post by juhanima »

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…

  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
Actually the growth peaks in a young forest as soon as there is at least one leaf or needle on most possible paths of a sunray. This is called canopy closure, and as soon as it has been achieved the growth starts to decline. This has been studied extensively, here is one example:

https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/2397

The reason in a nutshell is that when trees start to compete on the available sunlight by out-growing and overshadowing each other, they need to work harder to pull water up to the top where most of the photosynthesis happens. The leaves or needles in the shadow produce almost nothing but still consume resources for respiration.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#212

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #187
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…

In Brooklyn we now have four (FOUR!) different containers for trash in our little apartment. Since I was a kid and recycling began as "a thing" it's gotten more and more complex and expensive on the consumer's end. Shouldn't this process be trending the other way?

They way I remember it in the early days of recycling we had to sort into plastics, glass, and paper, but sometime in the last ten years or so everything's moved to a single stream one-bucket process.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#213

Post by chiph »

mikestew wrote: post #58

My dog loves the air packs, to the point that I can barely get a package in door without him grabbing at it. He'll open the package, pull the air packs out, pop them and walk away. The novelty must be wearing off, as he's been leaving unpopped ones lately. So, unlike packing peanuts, we get some secondary use out of air packs.

Similar here. I cut a few of them off the chain, and toss them in the air (their low density and a running ceiling fan mean they float down) and the cat attacks them. A few claw & bite punctures later and they're ready for recycling.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#214

Post by agentgt »

> not to mention that stores in the U.S. use some 100 billion plastic bags every year

It is amazing how many people still do not use reusable tote bags.

If your like me and you forget to bring them or put them back into the car one way to remember is to put them on your coat rack or next to your master grocery list (ie a pad of paper you fill out during the week).

Even if I forget the bags I will often buy a new tote bag at the store.... in practice the more bags I have the less I seem to forget them (ie spares in the car).

I'm incredibly lazy so I have to imagine many others can do it.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#215

Post by brandon272 »

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.

Or as bad as throwing your used CFLs and propane tanks in your recycling bin. "Let them figure it out!"

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#216

Post by x1798DE »

agentgt wrote: post #214

> not to mention that stores in the U.S. use some 100 billion plastic bags every year It is amazing how many people still do not use reusable tote bags. If your like me and you forget to bring them or put them back into the car one way to remember is to put them on your coat rack or next to your master grocery list (ie a pad of paper you fill out during the week). Even if I forget the bags I will often buy a new tote…

I'm dubious on the value of reusable tote bags. For one thing, I pretty heavily re-use plastic bags that I get, anyway. I use them to bring my lunch to and from work, I use them as laundry and shoe-bags when traveling (to keep dirty things separate from clean clothes in a single bag), and then I (and everyone I've ever met) use them as trash can liners for small trash cans.

Given the large amount of additional resources it takes to create one of these reusable tote bags, and the fact that you need to wash them occasionally, it's not clear to me that they are a net benefit, even if you always know ahead of time that you are going to the store and always remember to bring them with you.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#217

Post by agentgt »

x1798DE wrote: post #216
agentgt wrote: post #214

> not to mention that stores in the U.S. use some 100 billion plastic bags every year It is amazing how many people still do not use reusable tote bags. If your like me and you forget to bring them or put them back into the car one way to remember is to put them on your coat rack or next to your master grocery list (ie a pad of paper you fill out during the week). Even if I forget the bags I will often buy a new tote…

I'm dubious on the value of reusable tote bags. For one thing, I pretty heavily re-use plastic bags that I get, anyway. I use them to bring my lunch to and from work, I use them as laundry and shoe-bags when traveling (to keep dirty things separate from clean clothes in a single bag), and then I (and everyone I've ever met) use them as trash can liners for small trash cans. Given the large amount of additional resour…

In my experience a single reusuable tote bag can carry 8x of a typical grocery store plastic bag. We have bags that are 6 years old and probably been used more than 200 times. They are polypropylene bags which apparently are often made from recycled bags anyway.

As for reusing plastic bags I do that as well as inevitable you will pick up some.

As for washing bags I almost never do because almost everything put in the bag is in some other container.

At least you have the option with reusable bags to clean them and thus could pre remove residues and toxins.

With plastic bags you might be exposed to various toxins (albeit probably at low levels). Just pickup and smell new plastic bags if you don't believe me. Ideally you shouldn't smell anything but I almost always do which means something volatile is being released.

The other issue is plastic bags aren't just bad because they take oil and energy to make... they are pretty awful for wild life. I have actually had to help turtles in the Charles River get out of plastic bags.

Apparently poly bags take 11x what it takes to make a single plastic bag [1]. But this again doesn't take into account how much you can overload a reusable bag with out them breaking and previously mentioned points (as well as being far more comfortable to hold on to... I just love how plastic bags cut off blood supply to fingers).

As for paper bags... they rip and suck in the rain.

[1]: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/are-reusable-bags-worse-for...

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#218

Post by GFischer »

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…

Actually, "black liquor" is usually burned, and some pulp mills are even energy-positive. The main problem is not energy, it's pollution (a huge source of controversy here in Uruguay, we have several huge pulp mills).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_liquor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPM_(company)#Uruguay :

"provides CO2-neutral biomass-based electricity "

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#219

Post by douche »

GFischer wrote: post #218
gumby wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Actually, "black liquor" is usually burned, and some pulp mills are even energy-positive. The main problem is not energy, it's pollution (a huge source of controversy here in Uruguay, we have several huge pulp mills). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_liquor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPM_(company)#Uruguay : "provides CO2-neutral biomass-based electricity "

Some mills will even produce paper at a loss, in order to produce black liquor to make power from. Especially when there are "green" power subsidies involved.

It's kind of insane, but there was a mill near where I grew up that was doing exactly this a few years ago.

Re: About Those Air Cushions in Amazon Packages

#220

Post by [deleted] »

userbinator wrote: post #193
abalone wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The compostable idea is so much better than mailing them back because of the transport cost. In fact compostable air cushions exist: http://www.fpintl.com/biodegradable_packaging_cello_bubble_w...

Except that biodegradable packaging means the manufacturer needs to continue producing (and distributing) it, which incurs its own cost.

[deleted]
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