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Comment by pera | Hacker News Reader

Please Amazon, do something different about the huge amount of material waste generated by companies like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh. This is the main reason why I stopped using these services, the footprint is just disgusting: plastic bags inside aluminum+plastic bags inside cardboard boxes with more plastic. Please, invent some form of reusable container that can be easily stored and delivered back so we can stop trashing the Earth.

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Amazon needs to do this with their regular shipments as well. They contain a lot of plastic insulation (air bags). Instead of throwing mine away, I've been saving it until it fills up a closet then I give it to a local UPS store to reuse. My closet fills up in about a month. It would be nice if Amazon had a formal program for this since you can't recycle them with your garbage company.

The manufacturer has a program to recycle them:

https://sealedair.com/product-care/recycling-bubble-wrap-pla...

You can also use Amazon boxes to donate used clothes and household items:

http://givebackbox.com/amazon

givebackbox is cool.

Took a look at sealedair's 'program'. I could be wrong, but it looks like it's just links to other organizations' directories of local recycling programs; most of which are retail stores. Here's why I don't trust retail stores (Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowes, Safeway, etc...): while they do a great job of marketing their 'recycling programs' most of what we put into their recycle bins just end up in their normal dumpsters which defeats the purpose.

No, it says to send it back to them:

> The deflated cells can be sent to any of a number of Sealed Air locations where they will be recycled back into LDPE

If you're in the US, send them here:

  Ameri-Pak, Inc.
  Sealed Air Recycle Center
  477 South Woods Dr.
  Fountain Inn, South Carolina 29644

That's not a good program... but it's better than nothing.

They've been actively working on that for almost a decade [1]. Most (all?) cushioning in my packages is now heavy brown paper or plastic air bags, a significant improvement from the days of packing peanuts and bubble wrap. I'd like to see the air bags go away too.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/zhr3q9mgfqub33r

Yeah I was refering to air bags.

I received an order of towels from Amazon in a too-large box, filled with air bags. For towels.

That's nice, I was not aware that UPS would take them. My local grocery store have a program for plastic bags, but reusing them is of course much more efficient.

I could be wrong but lot of these shipping stores are franchises, so it probably depends on the owner.

> then I give it to a local UPS store to reuse

Nice one! I hadn't thought of this, but I'll start doing it now.

The problem is, if you want to cheaply ship cheap stuff quickly, you need to reduce costs. So no time to have your packers pick from 20 sizes of boxes; just toss everything in a huge box. No time to handle returns of broken shipments; just stuff those huge boxes with tons of air bags. No time to actually check what's in the boxes (towels or a vase) because you need to pack 200 boxes an hour to break even.

If "we" want to stop trashing the world, first we need to show we are willing to pay for that.

> If "we" want to stop trashing the world, first we need to show we are willing to pay for that.

This is the typical supply-side dodge. Consumers have little to no power here. I can't dictate to Amazon or major shipping companies (I do buy AMZN's frustration-free when I can).

What option is there? Do you propose I compete with the packaging with my own offering?

Wouldn't this paraphrase as "I have no power, so I will continue financially supporting them." ?

Consumers blame suppliers, suppliers blame consumers. No one has to do anything. Long live the status quo! :)

> suppliers blame consumers

That's the dodge right there. Easy as a supplier to simply say "we provide what the consumer wants" to justify all business decisions. Courage, that is.

This is normally where the government or watchdog organizations get involved - those have been gutted or defanged in the past few decades... by business interest group lobbying.

Maybe the boxes could be foldable, or easily and space-efficiently stackable.

Not just Amazon... almost all delivery services (pharmacy, google shopping express, etc)

The sole exception I found was amazingly, Safeway's grocery delivery service where the person showed up with a box, walked in, unloaded in my kitchen then took the box with him. Of course, you need to be present for that, but something equivalent for non-perishable delivery would be a huge sanity saver for me.

You can't recycle the air bags?

Actually Amazon Fresh is just this! They use local trucks to deliver the food. The food is placed inside a tote bag which contains reusable foam cushions and ice packs. You end up returning everything on the next delivery cycle. The downside is if you have a small apartment, it requires a bit of storage room.

We've recently tried out Terra's Kitchen primarily because they ship the meals in a reusable container that is returned to them. There's still a small amount of plastic that we have to dispose of, but the overall amount of waste seems to be dramatically lower than the competitors.

http://www.terraskitchen.com/how-it-works/

What's the resultant carbon footprint as a result of delivering these things back?

My guess is that the returning of the supplies could result in a lower carbon footprint. The whole delivery system is optimized for getting products from supplier to receiver, so there's a decent amount of unused capacity for getting items back into the delivery system. The "last mile" delivery trucks progress from full to near empty throughout the day and likely already pass or get super close to homes that could be returning packaging thus keeping the vehicle near capacity throughout the day. Once back into the delivery network the returning packaging should fill existing extra capacity especially as it get's closer to the supplier where they're already shipping out a much higher volume than they are receiving. Just a guess, but that's how I've rationalized it ;)

Or just have a collection compactor at WF. Easy peasy, and all squashed for easy transport.

Plus now recycling minded folks are likely to go by WF more frequently.

They could try to do both things (delivering new packages and taking back containers) at the same time.

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

http://pocketcultures.com/2012/01/25/argentinean-customs-hav...

And that is indeed what AmazonFresh does. They pick them up when they do your next delivery.

When I found out that Tile offers mail-in recycling for their trackers, I wondered the same thing. Perhaps this service is offered to assuage the guilty conscience of people who would like to buy a tracker but feel bad about buying something they'll throw away. But if it's something that can be recycled by the company (again, at what cost?), then it goes from being disposable to "reusable".

I agree with this. We struggle with how to dispose of the tremendous amount of waste created by our weekly delivery as we don't have a very large trash bin at our house.

Blue Apron and Hello Fresh need to figure out how to make their services more sticky. At some point we've collected enough meals that we like where we can just go to the local grocery store to pick up the ingredients and make it ourselves.

Both of these services sell convenience, but it is hard to keep selling that to existing users who grow weary of the amount of waste and the simplicity of just grabbing everything they need to make these meals on their own. Amazon's meal-kit could help solve this if they just add the ingredients to shopper's grocery list automatically and it's ready to be picked up at their next trip. Delivery is a non-starter in my opinion. It didn't work for grocery.com back in the early dotcom days, and it's not working now.

"we've collected enough meals that we like where we can just go to the local grocery store to pick up the ingredients and make it ourselves"

heh. welcome to a chef's world.

Haha. We partially signed up to broaden our culinary literacy. My Wife doesn't cook and when I cool it's typically something very simple. Blue Apron has helped give both my Wife and I more confidence to try new things.

Some of these companies do. Terra's Kitchen for example. That said, I'm skeptical that shipping a reusable container back to the company which then has to clean it before it's reused genuinely reduces environmental impact versus some plastic bags (much of which I reused the one time I got Blue Apron).

The packaging waste with some meal kits is a negative but they also eliminate a lot of food waste which is a positive.

The traditional food distribution system is massively wasteful but all of that waste is hidden so it is easier to ignore.

How does meal-kit distribution eliminate a lot of food waste?

Because the ingredients provided are the exact amounts needed for a meal. If I was making the same meal doing my own shopping I will probably purchase slightly more than I need of some perishable ingredients. These will in a lot of kitchens end up as waste and not used in other meals.

Leftovers?

One word answer's with a question mark are usually always the answer, thanks for contributing to the conversation.

That's fair, but when I shop I don't buy food with just one meal in mind. Sure, at home maybe I'll have a bit less onion one day then I would prefer because I used half of it the night before, but storing excess in the fridge and buying with leftovers in mind or multi-use items (bulk bag of carrots) means I have very little excess food waste. Certainly excess food waste is far, far less than packaging material from these companies.

You are the exception though. The statistical fact is that most people are like notyourwork, myself included. I'm absolutely horrible at this. I buy a huge bag of potatoes because even if I waste half the bag (although usually I'm not that bad) it's cheaper than buying a few as needed. I want to use them all but I just don't get around to it in time.

You can bake them in the microwave and put them in the freezer until needed. There's a lot you can do with a baked potato. I like to cut those freezer pot pies with them so they're actually filling.

And sometimes life happens and food goes bad before I have a chance to cook everything I purchased. I cook a lot so I am aware of the versatility of perishable ingredients. That doesn't change the premise of my point.

Why is this being downvoted? It's like almost every post here is interpreted as right/wrong in the context of The Great Argument, and as such, folks are punished for sharing in general. rainbowmverse contributed an idea I'd never thought of (being in notyourwork's camp myself), yet they are being downvoted because their post does not directly support The Most Correct Parent.

Like, can we just talk, sometimes?

It's not so much that people end up with a lot more food than they need and throw it out. It's the wastage at the supermarket and elsewhere in the distribution chain. Furthermore, I suspect the meal kit companies are tending to replace takeout of various sorts and eating out more than they're replacing conventional shopping and cooking.

And there's lots of waste throughout in those cases even when it's not visible.

It's hard to quantify any of that but, plastic bags or not, I suspect Blue Apron is relatively environmentally friendly.

Presumably because of better portioning. For a lot of meals, you only need a very small amount of one ingredient which you cannot buy in that quantity. Meal kits come with the right proportions for every ingredient.

Yes, waste is reduced on the consumer side, but there is also enormous waste in the supply chain and retail.

https://www.wired.com/2016/07/us-throws-away-much-half-food-...

Beyond normal shelf spoilage from super markets there's a lot of ingredients that can only really be bought fresh in amounts much larger than can really be used. For example cilantro or parsley generally comes in either in cheap large bunches or much more expensive individually (plastic) packaged smaller servings but the large bunches is way more than most people could reasonably use before it begins to wilt and rot so it's wasted.

Put the cilantro/parsley stems immersed in a glass of water. Cover the leaves with a plastic bag and it will keep in the refrigerator for at least a week without wilting

Might try that. Space is a little tight in our fridge though so it might not work.

> The packaging waste with some meal kits is a negative but they also eliminate a lot of food waste which is a positive.

That's really hard to estimate; did Blue Apron (etc) users previously buy a lot of groceries, cook some of them, then throw the rest of the food away as it rotted? Or did they simply cook less, and rely more on delivery, restaurants, or putting more work into planning their meals?

Food waste happens at every level of the food distribution system. Produce discarded in a field becuase it didn't meet some ripeness or quality standard(likely unchanged), produce that rots or is damaged during transport to local distribution channels(could be reduced by meal prep), food that rots or is unsold at the retail level (obviated by meal prep), food purchased by consumers that goes unused(obviated), and food waste that gets landfilled(instead of getting composted at meal prep place).

> plastic bags inside aluminum+plastic bags inside cardboard boxes with more plastic.

All recyclable, what's the problem here?

> Please, invent some form of reusable container that can be easily stored and delivered back so we can stop trashing the Earth.

So is the real issue that you're concerned with reducing waste (recyclable at that!) that's visible to you, consequences be damned? Because I'm not so sure shipping back an empty food container is better for the earth than recycling it.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order is what you should aim for. It still takes a lot of energy to recycle something and much less to reuse it as is or not use it in the first place

Again, this assumes that shipping an empty container however many miles uses less energy. BA has three, count 'em, three distribution centers for the entire country. If I live in Florida, what do you think has a lower carbon footprint? Recycling my BA waste, or shipping it to New Jersey?

That aphorism is true in general but reuse might still fall short here and it's most true when you're dealing with the recipient reusing the item themselves not shipping it back to be reused. To get the it back to Amazon or whatever meal service sent the boxes will require a second trip by your house to pick up the used items, the entire trip back to the warehouse where the food boxes are packed (which is probably not local unless Amazon gets into this in a big way, and smaller companies can't afford the huge build out of local packing and distribution when there's so little customer lock in), then finally the energy to fully wash and sanitize them before shipping out again.

In one single trip you can take an old container and deliver a new one with food. Also, Amazon owns Whole Foods, so I don't see why the warehouse couldn't be local. Finally, recycling plastic and glass usually requires washing the material.

Washing for recycling doesn't have to be nearly as thorough or sanitary as washing for reuse though. And yeah that might work for Amazon but no one else has the infrastructure to do local delivery like that. Even with whole foods local they'll still probably need to expand staff or food prep areas to make it work.

Kind of off topic, but for most of my childhood the mantra was "recycle everything, because plastic and food garbage in landfills takes centuries and centuries to break down"

With the new awareness that atmospheric CO2 is the main environmental problem facing the world (rather than giant landfills, which are un-aesthetic but not really a big deal), I've wondered whether this logic makes sense anymore.

Isn't a giant landfill full of carbon-based food, carbon-based plastic, and carbon-based paper a good form of carbon sequestration? Obviously it just buys us time, because it'll decompose in a few centuries, but hopefully by the time that happens we'll have better methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

The "greenest" plastic bag is the one that is never made.

Isn't plastic basically a byproduct of oil production? I'm not super familiar with the market, but my understanding was that gasoline was the main drivers of drilling, not the market for plastic.

It seems to me that recycling would just drop the price of plastic and encourage use elsewhere, but burying it underground would remove the byproduct.

Every petroleum product was a waste product at some point until they discovered a use for it. If no one used oil for anything but gasoline, I expect drillers would pump the distillation remains back down into old wells.

Petroleum cracking happens very long distances from the actual oil wells. I have never heard of this happening.

Because there is no waste...

There are several reasons to want to reduce the number and size of landfills. First, landfills are very oxygen-poor, which promotes the growth of anaerobic bacteria. The bacteria produce methane, rather than CO2 when breaking down waste. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 (though it doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long). Second, greenhouse gases are released in the extraction of petrochemicals. Reducing the new plastic created would reduce this effect. Lastly, landfills can have an immediate negative effect on the environment surrounding them if solvents and heavy metals leach out of the landfill.

Quite a few landfills capture the methane and turn it into electricity as they can make a profit doing so.

Maybe, but they have to make a new plastic bag if they don't recycle your old one. Energy is required to make that new bag, which means CO2 is created that way too.

The best thing you can do is to not need so much energy in the first place. If you must travel use high efficiency transport. (shipping counts as travel). Make sure your housing is well insulated.

The next best thing store carbon: start forest and grass fires. A regular forest/grass fire will burn cold enough that a lot of carbon is converted to charcoal - permanently sequestrated carbon. Note that regular is key here. If you don't light a new fire every year fuel builds up until you get a hot fire.

Most of the carbon in plastics comes from oil, not from the atmosphere.

But there's the problem that anaerobic decomposition in garbage bags creates methane, which is an even worse greenhouse gas than CO2.

The dabbawallas in India kind of solved it a long time ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTkGDXRnR9I any lessons transfer over?

Hello Fresh has improved a lot on this front in the 2 months we've subscribed. Individual meals are packed in paper bags. The aluminum insulation layer has been replaced with a biodegradable material packed in lightweight plastic. I believe they said recent improvements have reduced the size of a meal box by greater than 20%. It's still not perfect (the ice packs seem awfully wasteful, if unavoidable until refrigerated trucks become widespread), but it's dramatically better.

You can reuse the boxes, thermal bags, and ice packs just fine. My folks stitched together a bunch of the thermal bags to cover their tomato plants during the winter / early spring.

The smaller bags are problematic, though some of them are also reusable (if they have a zipper or equivalent mechanism for resealing). The little bottles/jars are also reusable, though I've yet to actually find a use for them.

>The little bottles/jars are also reusable, though I've yet to actually find a use for them.

I find they're handy for travel, picnics, etc. although admittedly if I used Blue Apron repeatedly I'd probably end up drowning in them.

All of the packaging that is used to typical meal kit companies can be easily stored and could easily be returned and is mostly reusable and what isn't is reccylcable; the one time up-front cost of setting up a recovery process probably hasn't been seen as being as valuable as working on scaling out subscriptions, though.

But there's nothing really that needs invented here.

While not perfect, Sun Basket does much better than most - a large portion is recyclable/compostable.

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