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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

At what ratio can they reduce the HUGE packaging waste?

A few years ago there was an Amazon promo for when they first started "same day" delivery in another city, where all deliveries were in paper bags.

But while Amazon now offers "same day" service from a warehouse 20 minutes away, and delivers all their own stuff, everything continues to arrive in huge wasteful cardboard boxes.

I like Amazon, I like ordering from Amazon, but I'm tired of recycling entire trunks worth of cardboard boxes often holding very small items.

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I'm interested to know this as well. However I'm more interested to know the overall environmental impact of buying some from Amazon in their current state.

At what distance is it overall more environmentally friendly for me to purchase from Amazon vs. taking my car and grabbing that item myself. I think I'd be surprised at how little that number is.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/environmen...

it's not a direct answer, but it seems like the answer is that it's essentially never more environmentally friendly to order online, because the odds that it actually eliminates a trip in your car are so tiny.

I imagine I'm atypical, but if I had to drive somewhere to pick up my online orders, my monthly car trips would go up between one and two orders of magnitude. But I do order a decent quantity of things on Amazon (for non-urgent things I use the "Amazon day" delivery option to help reduce their trips), and generally dislike driving and try to drive as little as possible (1-3 trips per week; pre-covid I could go weeks without driving).

I'd be curious to know what the environmental numbers are for someone like me.

You are not accounting for behavior change. Before the online ordering era, most people never went non-grocery shopping more than once a month. And did all that shopping in one big trip.

Once you think decide that all highly environmentally-destructive actions are not even an option on the table, your behavior changes.

That's a good point. Non-grocery items were a special trip, were rare, and usually involved months worth of purchases.

Prime has a thing called Amazon day, where all your orders arrive on the same day, unless specified.

Can’t use it because I’m in Canada, but would love this service. I’d batch it all to arrive before recycling day, and save my parcel receiving/unpacking efforts.

When ordering multiple things you can opt to have them shipped together to save some packaging, though it might mean an extra delay. I wonder if at some point Amazon will have more lockers available in most communities where they could deliver items without extra packaging and they can be safely picked up by only the recipient. I would be willing to go a little bit further to pick up my packages if it would save some packaging/speed up deliveries.

I am constantly baffled by just how much cardboard is being used. I would be very curious to read about its environmental impact.

Cardboard, per a story that was on HN a few weeks ago, is both almost entirely recyclable and has economic value. So the problem with cardboard isn’t even that it’s wasted, but that it’s being stolen from trash bins for recycling.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53724620

It’s one of the reminders that the invisible hand of economics, incentivised properly, can solve not all, but a surprising lot.

At some point, it seems like they need to account for the possibility that a given item will need to sit outside in the weather or in a partially secure location at a customer location for an unpredictable amount of time.

Outer packs protect the goods not just against long-distance parcel shipment.

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