UPS wants 2 inches of space between the product and the outer box... keeps real damage from happening if the outer box is slightly punctured by something.
https://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/ship/packaging/g...
https://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/ship/packaging/g...
Amazon never seem to actually bubble wrap anything any more - which has led to damage more than once. Neither the string of air pockets, as in the article, or paper is as effective as they rarely use enough to prevent movement.
Here in the UK Amazon seems to have switched solely to paper inner packaging. Environmentally I prefer this.
And Amazon does not seem to care. It is so bad that I have shifted purchases offline to Costco in part so I don't have to deal with all this shipping waste. Costco doesn't even give me a bag.
This might be of interest to you; send your gently used stuff to Goodwill, in Amazon boxes, for free.
If you don’t want to visit the links below, the sticker is 4 inches square, and the box is 7” x 5” x 10”. Why a cardboard mailer wasn’t enough, I don’t know. At least the seven air pouches included with it protected it from high G forces...
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 to recycle in Palo Alto but this article says, to my surprise, that that's uncommon. I'm not sure of the carbon impact of recycling PE.
While paper uses a lot of water and chemicals to make, and involves cutting down trees. It's also very heavy so costly in terms of fuel to transport and recycle.
Aesthetically, I agree that paper is much nicer.
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.
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.
https://archive.epa.gov/wastes/conserve/materials/paper/web/...
Still, I am not yet convinced vs the lifetime oil consumption & carbon release of paper packaging vs plastic.
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
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.
I'd be surprised if unbleached brown paper, screwed up as padding, came out worse environmentally than oil derived plastic. 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.
How do we evaluate 1,000 year lifespan vs months for impact? Does that change if we consider it ending up inside wildlife or the ocean foodchain?
Here in my part of the UK at least it's essentially non-recyclable.
I think I'd like to use less, but that's very much an instinctive view. I'd rather corn starch replacements for much packing as it better suits a one time temporary use.
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.
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!
It appears the trend is to externalize the sorting of materials, as this appears to be the most expensive part.
Are there dedicated paid human sorters? Would people volunteer to help in such a way?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_liquor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPM_(company)#Uruguay :
"provides CO2-neutral biomass-based electricity "
It's kind of insane, but there was a mill near where I grew up that was doing exactly this a few years ago.
It definitely seems like a better method, but I'm curious if the shipping handling is different there.
(For reference, in the SE US I'd say about 1:15 Amazon boxes arrives with some kind of damage. 1:40 with worrisome damage)
I can see now how a majority of the parcels may get through ok, but the few that end up caught or trapped will end up in very poor condition.
That said I used to often have CDs and DVDs delivered from Amazon.jp to Sweden when I lived there that were packed the same way and they arrived safely, but CDs and DVDs are probably the easiest thing to ship.
You probably want something to fill the space. Empty boxes are easy to unintentionally crush, exposing the contents to damage, weather, and loss.
Paper will probably add less support unless it's really packed, but it will still add some.
Dear vendor: You can take your RMAs, your restocking fees and your lame-ass excuses for shirking responsibility and shove it where the sun don't shine. Because, Amazon.
Sorry for the poor quality. Box is roughly 24" x 18" x 6" containing one approximately 13 inch long kitchen utensil (a silicon whisk) and 7-8 useless air cushions.