No more cardboard boxes? 3M invents an ingenious new way to ship products | Hacker News Reader

No more cardboard boxes? 3M invents an ingenious new way to ship products

fastcompany.com

29 pointsJSeymourATL22 comments

"Compared to cardboard boxes, which can be easily recycled, that’s a hassle most consumers likely won’t bother with. Kent recognizes this is a problem"

Is this even true??

What part? That cardboard can be easily recycled (true), that most consumers probably won't bother with a recycling process that isn't curbside (seems likely), or that the company representative recognizes that the difficulty of recycling their product is a problem (I'll take FC's word for it)?

Missing off the sentence before this kind of reverses the meaning, have you possibly misread what the journalist intended?

If true, the way to address it is through culture hacking, not materials science.

"The roll is made out of three layers of different plastic"

So it's basically Paper vs Plastic. What is bad about the cardboard boxes that these thing replaces?

Are you asking what is bad about the cardboard, or what is bad about the box?

Nothing is wrong with the cardboard except weight. Nothing is bad about the box except for the remainder of unused space that is in almost every package (and filled with more expensive paper or inflated filler)

For a shipper, minimizing weight and wasted space is a double win. This product has nothing to do with what the consumer wants.

So its even more difficult to recycle than single-layer plastics and still of no use to anything too large for a padded envelope.

Well it's multipurpose. One roll can ship many different things. Otherwise you need an inventory of various sized boxes. I'm guessing it will find an instant niche.

More plastic? We should be getting away from plastics....

Especially single-use..

I find that interesting. I’m wondering how that opening actually works. Aren’t the layers glued together?

Also, what about sending the item back? You’ll need a new wrap.

Today, I expect products to be environment-friendly. We should not create more plastic to fill our only planet.

Recyclable but probably only once into various second-generation foams and fillers. Then on to be land filler.

Lowering emissions is just a side-effect that might apply to any individual shipment but could easily be undone by the increased number of shipments enabled by lowering costs. The calculations that they haven't done yet really ought to have been done before making any environmental or economic claims, including accounting for the wisdom of replacing biodegradable and renewable paper products with another disposable application for a non-renewable resource.

Doesn't a cardboard box also provide protection? Often, the box includes the product as well as packaging material. In the absence of material, doesn't the air help it a bit (ala a potato chip bag)?

Aside from the plastics vs. paper issue, how do you pack these things into a shipping container or trailer? Can you imagine the logistics of every order Amazon packs being a (nearly) unique size?

Interesting idea but it doesn't address the plastics problem. I can't stand those giant plastic bubble wrap envelopes amazon and others seem to love using. You can't easily reuse them and they cant be placed in plastics recycling (though they can be recycled with other plastic bags at supermarkets or recycling locations). At least I can find other uses for cardboard and have often recycled boxes for storage or as raw materials for a project.

I save ‘em and re-use them on EBay sales.

I wish amazon better consolidated its shipments. Most of the time I don’t care for 2 day shipping and would rather get everything together in 1 box every couple weeks.

Amazon offers to ship on your "Amazon Day", which appears to consolidate all your weekly deliveries on a day of your choice.

My feeling about this? A much more polluting option, that nevertheless will be adopted because it's more convenient than card boxes. Poor Earth.

How is this better than bubble-wrap envelopes? It seems to suit the same use cases.

It's easier to trim it to size, meaning better space efficiency and less wasted packing material without having to buy a bunch of different envelope sizes.

Needs a cardboard version.

Yeah, if they could replace one or more of those layers with paper (and/or use one of the various biodegradable plastics available nowadays), it'd be a universal win on pretty much every metric except maybe cost (though there's no way paper's expensive enough to make a significant difference in this case).

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