Hacker News Reader

Comment by altairprime | Hacker News Reader

Does Amazon declare the financial and legal risks of externalizing the disposal costs of their plastic- and styrofoam-based (and cardboard!) packaging onto municipal recycling and waste processing?

For example: what would it cost Amazon if they were charged a recycling fee for all single-use packaging by the state California?

View on HN

They already are in some jurisdictions.

It doesn't actually cost them much per item, but in aggregate they'll foist the cost onto consumers where they are allowed.

Is this fee widespread and becoming moreso, or is it merely buried in the taxes for five counties out of five hundred thousand? Is it a financial risk to Amazon that consumers would rebel against being charged fees per bag/box?

> For example: what would it cost Amazon if they were charged a recycling fee for all single-use packaging by the state California?

The bigger question is what would it cost the planet. For Amazon to collect and recycle the packages, rather than the local municipality, would enormously increase the amount of emissions created.

You would be making things much much much worse.

For Amazon to be forced to charge to the customer a small fee for each package shipped, modeled after the electronics recycling fee that California requires to be charged and disclosed at time of purchase, would create a financial risk to their revenue stream, by forcing Amazon to charge customers a fee for every different box and bag used — not to mention compelling customers to use the “reduce number of boxes” option by default, which forces Amazon to absorb the consolidation cost previous externalized by cheap shipping from multiple depots back into their logistics chain. Given only this one example, do those risks reach the levels of potential impact necessary to compel its disclosure in public filings? Are there other examples?

The cheap shipping from multiple depots may be cheap because it's more efficient than consolidating first, so it may be making the situation worse.

I can declare it for them: $0. The garbage collection people take the trash from Amazon's customers, rather than Amazon.

Probably crippling for them. The scale of materials they use must be astronomical and their retail business has thin margins.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com