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Many plastic items are single use items with a low lifetime. Recycling all these short lived single use items is absurd. An Amazon box lasts 1 day and then needs to be turned into pulp again and made into a new box if everything is recycled correctly?

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Cardboard (not plastic) is highly recyclable. By starting with pulp, roughly 50% of the water and energy are saved. Keep in mind Amazon boxes almost always consist of ~100% recycled material.

And the portion that can't be recycled into boxes is likely made into paper towels.

It's extremely profitable to recycle cardboard in most jurisdictions.

Theoretically, it seems like turning a box back into pulp could be easier than waiting 25 years to grow another tree.

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