It tried this with plastic bins. Customers just kept the bins. Enforce return by fining customers who don't return bins? What if they say they were stolen off their porch?
You have a huge chain of custody problem here.
So things will be awesome when the problem is solved.
It's usually money that solves problems.
Amazon customers want environmentally friendly shipping. So they pay the extra $5 deposit, which Amazon gives back when the container is returned.
Those who don't want to return the container have paid for it.
Then of course other companies and industries must become greener because customers demand it. And Amazon already has a solution in place for reusable/returnable shipping containers, so it becomes an even bigger win for Amazon when it sells reusable/returnable shipping container service end to end and manages all the chain of ownership stuff and absorbs the complexity and risk.
As I say, it's a HUGE problem, so a huge win for whichever company implements what I've already set out above. Just needs to happen that's all.
In the future, look for the option "Add $5 for shipping box return collection" on your favorite ecommerce site.
And look to Uber to expand to "UberEnvironment" - their container collection service where they pay people to collect containers and return them to cleaning/reuse centers.
There are so many, many, many delivery startups out there - they'll be able to expand not only to sending stuff to homes but collecting stuff (containers) from homes.
Citation needed. They want it without the burden of...
>>> So they pay the extra $5 deposit
I highly doubt a large percentage of Amazon customers want environmentally friendly shipping that they have to pay a deposit for and mind a chain of custody.
As I noted, Amazon literally already tried this and it didn't work. So, yeah, it's a problem. And eventually someone will fix it. But you act like Amazon hasn't tried it, and you're ignoring all the chain of custody issues with a deposit system that requires shipping rather than a customer-returns method that worked decades years ago when people shopped locally only.
People on HN are pretty out of touch with the every day person, I think. These ideas sound really good to medium-high net worth individuals, but the average consumer on Amazon is not in that group and really does not care about the environment all that much if it is going to potentially hurt their pocketbook.
Personally, I think it would be great if these reusable packages optionally came in a package that has a digital lock that can only be unlocked through the app (i.e. public key crypto over Bluetooth/NFC). This would make them look like the secure option as well as the green option. It can even operate at a loss and probably still be beneficial by driving more purchases their way.
There's a reason why safes need to be bolted to the floor; a safe that's not bolted can just be taken away and opened somewhere else with appropriate tools.
Suppose you live in a location where you leave the materials out for return pick-up, but scavengers collect them rather than the shipper?
It's not feasible for the customer to stand guard over the packaging. It's effectively discriminatory to impose a financial penalty based on residence (a factor which cannot readily be controlled or changed).
Some alternative means of assuring returns would have to be arrived at.
Tracking, centralised or localised return depots, or other mechanisms, might be possiblities.
Surely Amazon, of all people, is capable of slapping a unique barcode on each one, and crediting that $5 back to the account it belonged to?
Some pallets already have these types of chips embedded, and it has ensured these pallets are returned in most cases (and prevented pallet resale).
The theft is beyond the control of the recipient / customer.
That's my point.
Much the same way as such neighbourhoods are already food and retail deserts either because direct risks of operation are too high, or because insurers and/or banks won't back or support ventures there.
Paul Baran, co-inventer of packet-switched networking, wrote about the underlying problem in the 1960s:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3780.html (footnote, p. 7)
Look to instrumentation options. The USB cable hack making rounds a week or so back was based on a SoC that measures 5mm square and sells for $1 per unit.
Adhesive-applied tracking sensors that can be put on virtually everything at a unit cost of $0.25 - $0.50 are likely possible within another year or so, if not already. These can track for shock and orientation in shipping, as well as location. Theft can be identified --- if not attributed, at least high-risk environments can be identified, and alternatives considered (in-store pickup, say).
Mind: the same tracking can also produce highly negative applications. Given falling costs, we'd better 1) start thinking about these and 2) get used to this. Though part of my #2 includes constructing legal limitations and protections against malicious use of this data.
That sounded interesting to me so I tried searching for an article about it, but I couldn’t find anything that talked about Amazon using plastic shipping containers. Do you remember where you read about it?
I'm kind of shocked that you would think of this as a bad thing. If a person is given an item and they find a use for it that isn't harmful, why should that item be forcably repossessed?
I would absolutely appreciate a shipping service that takes back cardboard boxes, plastic, etc. used in the delivery of the item, and actually this used to be the case. The milkman wouldn't just deliver the bottles, he would take empty bottles and the company would reuse them. Soda companies as well, used to give out money to recoup the bottles used. It's really only when we moved to the supermarket system, and the plastic bottle, that we stopped doing this. But if you kept the bottles, they didn't outright charge you for it.
Actually, according to capitalism charging for the packaging would be a positive move but ineffective and probably negative over the long run.
This is because charging for the packaging means you can extract more of a profit from the consumer per delivery. The more packaging you can give them the harder it is to return it and the more you can charge for it (obviously this isn't linear because at some point the packaging costs more than you can easily charge, but in that instance you just do it gradually), and the more incentive for Amazon or whomever to make it difficult to return it. At the same time, it allows them to say that they're doing something, and provides a pretty good political defence for them for them to charge more per packaging.
In the glass bottle example, you - the customer - take the bottles to a recycling center or to the grocery store. (I remember doing this with cans and bottles with my father as a young boy, growing up without a ton of money.)
In the Amazon example, you - the customer - take the bins... where? I live in Seattle, so it's easy enough for me to take them to an Amazon pickup location, but probably not for someone in rural Kansas.
Leave the bins out to be shipped back to UPS? Those bins are worth a considerable amount of money on deposit most likely, and are prime targets for theft or misappropriation. How is this resolved? You have created a large chain of custody problem and a large burden on their support team.
This is all doable. The price will just have to be quite a bit higher than it was in the past for what is likely fairly minimal positive impact on the environment. Take a look at industrial pollution / CO2 effects on the planet by country adjusted for GDP. The United States is not close to the prime offender today - and it'll be even worse in 30 years as China/India go through their own Industrial and Informational revolutions.
That's not actually the case though. Of course it's costly to Amazon to ship plastic containers, but you don't have to increase the price. In the case of the bottles, it was cheaper to pay people to return them than to make new glass bottles. Likewise, it's likely cheaper for Amazon to pay people to return new boxes than it is for them to send new ones.
The people are the ones helping Amazon cost-save, Amazon isn't doing anyone but themselves a favour by shipping better packaging. The only incentive from Amazon's perspective here is so that they market about how they're recycling more, and how much better protected the items are.
Better how?
>> Likewise, it's likely cheaper for Amazon to pay people to return new boxes than it is for them to send new ones.
Plastic is heavier and less uniform than cardboard boxes that UPS/DHL expect, making their trucks less efficient, which increases the prices to Amazon.
It's definitely not cheaper to do what you are suggesting. They wouldn't have stopped doing it in the first place if it was. They asked for customers to return the bins and everything, just like you are laying out. It did not work.
Mind: if it turns out that there are high-risk environments -- high crime neighbourhoods -- where a financial penalty could prove onerous and avoidance of true theft is difficult, delivery firms would have to come up with some alternative option in which return of the materials is assured. Failure to do so effectively replicates geographic redline or discrimination zones, even if the underlying cost risk models are valid representations of activities.
The point is to manage those risks in a non-discriminatory manner.
The problem seems solvable and would tremendously help Amazon's image as a green company.
Legitimately everyone would hate this change. People who work 9-5 M-F aren't interested in doing extra work to get their shampoo delivered via signature and/or pickup at some place 15-20 miles away in an industrial area.
For a pick-up / package-hold service, the unboxing could be supervised. Delivery drivers aren't going to want to wait for recipients to remove packaging. And in many cases, the signer won't be the same person as the unboxer.
or even worse, like you said, the signer won't necessarily be the recipient, so:
"Oh boy, I can't wait for my parents to unbox my sex toys and lingerie in front of a bored delivery driver"
Oops.