I've been thinking about the ecological sustainability thing thanks to today's news, but it's actually
not about supply chains, per se. The news is that China has tightened restrictions on importing foreign waste. (We recycle very little of our own "recycling" in North America; we ship it to Asia where they do it, at least in theory.) Anyway, we have tons of cardboard and plastics on ships already headed for China that will probably be shipped back.
This is a many-sided problem. A few stray thoughts: it's not just a matter of buying recycled materials, it's whether you can recycle stuff after using it. A "demand chain" more than a supply chain, if you will. There's a pendulum aspect to this, where China has tolerated environmental atrocities in the name of growth for decades, and now rather than embarking on a measured reform plan, they're essentially rejecting all foreign waste. Maybe we should have seen it coming. There's also the domestic and international differences in the way we deal with trash. I have lived all over the US and spent time in most states. When I walk down the street in Austin, most of the recycling bins on the street are larger than the trash bins. That's standard in places like Austin and the Bay, but still exceptional in America at large. In much of Europe, you essentially buy permits for recycling, and costlier ones for trash. American consumption has been unbridled by the waste issue throughout the 20th century, but that's likely to change as we run out of places to put it, whether those places be landfills or other countries.
So, how to build a venture out of this mess? There are a few ideas. Recycling technologies are big. I read recently about a startup (funded by MassChallenge, I think?) that was trying to turn waste plastic into diesel fuel. The biggest process problem with recycling is contamination— how do you get it below, e.g., 0.5%? (China's new threshold amount.) Better AI, more dextrous robots? Maybe. Microbes or insects that just eat the food off plastic or cardboard pulp?
Thinking outside little processes and at larger scale, we should probably start recycling our own waste on our own shores. It would seem more efficient than shipping all our opened Amazon boxes to China, it would create some jobs, and based on both culture and governance, the environmental side-effects would probably be much lighter than shipping the same waste to Vietnam or Thailand. But the scale necessary to do this is massive. China's waste importers are worried that their businesses will become insolvent, because they have built economies of scale for recycling that require more waste than their billion-man domestic economy currently produces. Do we have either the capital or political will to build that?
If you're not a garbage person, fine. Materials, then: get it before it becomes trash. The world is shopping online more, which means more individually boxed items and more cardboard. How do you use less of it per package, or make it break down more easily? The rules of the game are that it can't increase the cost of shipping and it needs to be hygienic enough that you don't give any infants botulism or something. Do you think Amazon's already optimized that problem, or is there a step change to be had?