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Comment by leftnode | Hacker News Reader

We canceled after a week precisely for this reason. I couldn't believe how much trash a single shipment generated.

I hear this a lot from people. When I go grocery shopping I have bags and boxes for nearly everything I purchase. When I order items on Amazon I get boxes and tons of packing materials. What is a better alternative that does not generate tons of trash?

Blue Apron also does a good job at allowing you to send back the materials so they can recycle them. I just point this out as I think they get a lot of criticism for a company that I don't think generates more trash than a lot of alternatives and they give an option to recycle.

Right - but I don't have daily trash for spices. Or for eggs. It's not the fact that they generate trash. It's the frequency and quantity.

> When I go grocery shopping I have bags and boxes for nearly everything I purchase.

You don't get enough cold packs and insulation for it to stay cold for a couple of days in a hot shipping distribution center / truck, though.

Trash is generally a byproduct of convenience, so I'm not surprised to hear this product generates a lot of trash. One can say the same thing about Keurigs, that hilarious Juicero thing, and many other services. I instinctively avoid this kind of thing now, not just because of the quality compromise but also this trash efficiency compromise. It's really short-sighted and lazy to consume in this fashion.

Go to a damn farmer's market and plan out your week, people!

Your accusatory comment assumes that the reader:

* Lives in an area with a farmer's market in accessible range (i.e. they don't live in a food desert[1] like ~24 million Americans - and that's just any kinda real market)

* Spends as much or less at the market as on a service like this, factoring in all externalities such as food waste, travel time and expense, and so on

* Has the time to spend getting to the market and shopping

* Has the cash on hand (many farmers markets are cash only - anyone on SNAP, ~43M people[2], is now excluded since those benefits are usually on cards)

* Has a situation that allows "planning out their week"

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

[2]: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/...

Somehow those people in "food deserts" managed to get by for hundreds of years before this era of wasteful ultra-convenience startups.

They're a fairly recent development.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2516593/

> In 1961, more than 75% of London’s inner-city population lived within 1 kilometer of a supermarket, giving them easy access to a variety of foods, says principal investigator Jason Gilliland, who directs the university’s Urban Development Program. In 2005, he says, that number was less than 20%.

what's a single shipment typically composed of? Curious since I was thinking of trying it.

Do you mean like cardboard/plastic packaging? I was thinking materials would come in re-usable container. Not fancy, but even somewhat "cheapy" re-usable material.

From Googling around, lots of plastic bags:

https://www.jennettefulda.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ing...

I haven't used Blue Apron but used one of their competitors and you'd get the ingredients like this but they'd also be in a big styrofoam container (to help insulate against the elements). The other problem was if you had 2 recipes that each called for a cucumber you'd get 2 individually bagged cucumbers. I don't know if they're smarter about this but that was a big turn off when I tried it.

Lots of individual plastic bags, but they are recyclable in the giant plastic bag recycling box at the grocery store. We would just stuff them all into a larger bag for storage and drop it all off next time we actually went to the store.

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