Amazon increased US plastic packaging despite global phase-out | Hacker News Reader

Amazon increased US plastic packaging despite global phase-out

theguardian.com

64 pointslaurex79 comments

I can only assume attitudes towards plastics are different in the US to Europe? Here, sustainable packaging has become expected. If there's a non-plastic way to package a product, that is what consumers expect.

Just today I watched a video about Papa John's where they proudly proclaimed moving from cardboard packaging to plastic for "visuals" (https://youtu.be/9RXObjS639M?t=457). This just wouldn't wash in Europe.

That's actually astonishing. As so often it feels like the reactionary culture of the US is actively dragging the world down. Especially in relation to environmental protection, privacy rights and conflict escalation.

A microcosm of US mentality is the number of people who blast RATM's Killing In the Name Of purely for the refrain, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!" and have absolutely no idea what the rest of the song is about. Including the subset of people who fail to realize that the song is specifically about them.

Some of the most damaging reactionary culture is being anti-nuclear despite it clearly being the best method of power generation alongside wind and solar. And the US is not alone in being stupidly anti-nuclear

I don't think the data supports this thesis, even though it comes up every so often.

We should absolutely use the existing nuclear reactors until they can't be maintained anymore, but it's economics never really made sense. It was only viable because the construction was essentially socialized and the storage for the waste never included in the calculation.

But I'm not a specialist on the topic, so I'm not talking with authority here.

Nuclear is by far the cheapest large scale generation option if you factor in the cost in dollars and human lives for the nasty byproducts of fossil fuel based energy. And nuclear waste is somewhere between a solved problem and non-issue despite lots of propaganda saying otherwise.

Millions of people die a year from fossil fuel burning. Effectively zero for nuclear.

Well, we are a very low-density country, population-wise. Most of the country is uninhabited. Landfills are cheap and plentiful and fairly environmentally neutral. Even if plastic takes 500 years to decompose, we couldn’t fill 1% of the country with landfills full it in that time if we wanted to.

Cost of living is a big issue here, what to do with all those used chicken wing packages is not.

I’m not saying we don’t dislike single use plastic, we’re moving away from it somewhat too. But it’s just really not much of a problem.

In many cases, plastic packaging is better for the environment. A friend of mine owns a sauerkraut company that switched from glass jars to plastic bags. Glass jars need a lot more energy (and thus co2 emissions) to both create and transport. One truck of plastic bags probably holds as many packages as 20 trucks of glass jars.

Of course, there’s the issue of induced demand which makes everything murky. And certainly, there are many cases where we simply could go without packaging entirely.

But it’s not nearly as clear cut as “plastic bad”

Recently a friend went to the US for a couple weeks and he said "they still use plastic staws, that why they are a superpower and we're not".

It's a joke but depicts the reality of plastic usage.

What’s the alternative to plastic straws? There was a push in many US cities to get rid of them but they switched to paper straws where the vast majority of them were possibly worse for the environment, and even if not, the benefits were not significant.

Personally I carry my own metal straw around (especially for hot drinks…I’ve never understood people who drink hot drinks with plastic straws and I’d suspect whatever keeps a paper straw from not collapsing with hot drinks is likely to be something I don’t want in my system either) but am not sure if that’s a scalable solution? Is that what Europeans do?

Alternatively, of course, you just don’t use straws. Glasses exist…

> just don’t use straws

This is what I do. Not sure why straws are so popular. I heard restaurants pushed them because it made people drink more/faster, but most places have free refills these days so that doesn't really make sense anymore.

It's kinda hard to drink a soft drink with ice cubes without a straw. Get rid of the ice cubes, and you don't need a straw anymore. Or you could use a (paper!) lid similar to that on coffee-to-go cups.

> It's kinda hard to drink a soft drink with ice cubes without a straw.

What's hard about it? I seem to have no trouble.

I can’t recall the last US restaurant that didn’t have free drink refills. Why would they want to push people to consume something they refill for free faster? Is it possible people just like straws?

There was a time when drink refills were not free, you had to pay for another drink. The arugment was, they gave you straws so you would drink more and buy larger or more drinks.

At some point restaurants realized they could offer free refills as a competitive advantage, (or save labor and have customers fill their own drinks) and now everyone does it. At that point, straws were just something that was expected.

Can you prove this at all? I’m seeing White Castle offered free refills in the early 60s and plastic drinking straws didn’t become popular until the same time period.

I worked at McDonald's for several years in the 1980s, they did not do free drink refills (coffee excepted) at that time. As I recall, most other restaurants did the same.

They're really great for drinking while driving without spilling your drink on bumpy roads.

> What’s the alternative to plastic straws?

not using straws?

Yeah, I just don't use straws, except for the copper tube someone gave me, which I only use once or twice a week when I'm chatting with friends using a headset that would get bumped when sipping warm water. I mostly drink water, and am not concerned about spilling in the car.

Now that I eat more fiber, from sprouted legumes, fresh fruits and vegetables, and microwaved-in-a-little-water root vegetables, I find I can go a lot longer without drinking water.

What percentage of people drink who drink beer or wine drink it with a straw?

What percentage of people who drink sugary beverages use straws, and why the difference?

Looking at the big picture, in terms of trade off, how much benefits are there to plastic straw bans vs the large amount of inconvenience it generates for consumers? Hear me out.

Plastic bags, plastic cups, plastic cup lids, styrofoam, plastic packaging, plastic candy wrappers, etc, frankly speaking, the average consumer does not give a shit about what these things are made of. Which is also to say, the average consumer would not mind at all if any of these things were required to be renewable. These are all things a manufacturer, restaurant, supplier, etc cares about, they are the ones on the hook for solving the problem of making these renewable, they are the ones who are usually impacted by most bans like this.

But plastic straws are something that the average consumer does care about, they stick this into their mouth, it effects the quality of their meal. For people with certain medical conditions, all their meals must be consumed through these things. When you ban plastic straws you push a bunch of neutrals off the fence.

Plastic straw bans don't effect the usual industries, so bans are naturally going to be easier. I'm sure that plastic straw manufactures would be upset, but largely speaking the usual lobbyists for this kind of thing are unlikely to care. This deceives environmentalists into thinking this is a low hanging fruit. So legislation is passed, consumers get pissed, and now the people who care about the environment are less likely to get re-elected.

Was it worth it?

The plastic straw thing makes me sad. We spent our societal outrage on those instead of single-use plastic bottles. Sigh. I think they're a distraction.

Curious what is it like with grocery stores and plastic bags where you live? If I go to a large grocery store in US there could 100+ people in the store I can guarantee you I am the only one there with my resuable cloth/insulated grocery bags. Everyone else walks out with single use plastic bags.

Some countries have already sort-of banned single-use plastic bags (with exceptions where it makes sense).

Where I live supermarkets now only have paper bags or sturdy multi-use bags.

There will also be some EU wide legislation pretty soon.

I wish I could buy slightly thicker paper bags that lasted 10-15 uses for 8 cents apiece. I would gladly buy boxes of those instead of the cheap crappy single-use paper shopping bags. I reuse the paper bags as much as possible. The reusable bags are often made with plastic or plastic fibers. At least if a paper bag makes its way into the environment the wood pulp fiber gets digested by bacteria and fungi.

I tend to shop at Aldi (US) and never seem to have a bag with me. I buy the paper bags for $0.10 or whatever they cost, then I reuse them for recycling until they tear or fall apart, then they get recycled themselves.

The bigger supermarkets (Kroger, etc.) all default to using single-use plastic. They will give you paper bags if you ask, and of course you can bring your own but it doesn't seem very common.

As long as the markets provide disposable bags free/cheap, people will tend to do that out of convenience.

Well I'm in the UK and there's a plastic bag tax of 25p per bag. Since that law was introduced, everyone comes to the supermarket with their own bag.

The bag tax is 10p [1]. California has had a similar one since 2016 with a 10 cent fee [2].

Anecdotally, the fee seems to work well in both places, or at least single-use plastic bag use seems relatively low as most people seem to bring a reusable bag or use a backpack or similar.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/carrier-bag-charges-retailers-re...

[2] https://calrecycle.ca.gov/plastics/carryoutbags/

in caifornia the bag tax is applied equally to paper and plastic bags.

Yes, but the reusable bags seem to have become less durable and there has been a huge increase in the number of them used and therefore the amount of plastic used.

https://assets.ctfassets.net/bffxiku554r1/4TNPmg4tzrgoH39Iev...

I am not an expert in the field, but I have seen studies that claim single use plastic bags are better for the environment per use than multi-use bags, because the multiuse bags use so much more material and don't last long enough to make up for it.

I still use plastic bags, the ones I got over the years and they are completely worn out (as in, faded). Use them mostly for return of bottles/cans since they are not moisture absorbant.

Plastic bags here in Norway cost around 5 NOK (0.5$) and a reuse bag costs 10 but you get 1 back every time you use it.

You kind of have to explain yourself to the cashier if you want a plastic one.

If norway or norwegians cared so much, they wouldn't be pumping out so much oil. Norway is a top oil producer on a per capita basis ( along with saudi arabia, qatar, etc ).

If norwegians care so much about the environment or climate change, let them take out their oil platforms first.

The argument here (that I don't buy) has always been that the extraction and processing is much cleaner here than in some of the countries you mention.

Personally I agree that we should stop the oil and gas extraction as the more oil stay in the ground the better, and the country is split about 50/50 on this issue.

Unfortunately, the major parties have been against so far but the conservatives are finally starting to debate it internally and if they come down on the planned phase out of oil and gas it will happen. The major left wing parties are not interested so far.

There has been some movement the in the legal route, the supreme court recently declared some recent exploration licenses invalid due to a clause in our constitution, however we'll see how long that ban lasts.

In any case, not being fast enough in one area does not mean you have to pollute max in other areas.

My plastic bags get reused. Either by myself or I'll send a box to my sister in a state that banned them so she can reuse them.

Turns out there's a black market for plastic grocery bags.

I believe there have been a few studies that studied localities (in different parts of the world) that banned plastic bags, and they've all had either zero net effect on plastic usage or it actually increased.

Anecdotally, 100% of grocery-store plastic bags I get are reused as trash bags and doggy poop bags. Same for most other people I know. Very few actually get thrown away after one use. And as it turns out, people in areas where such bags are banned, they buy other kinds of plastic bags to use for those purposes.

A lot of restaurants have moved to this style of packaging. Even if it does improve heat retention/reduce sogginess[0], it's frustrating.

[0] They claim it does, but I'm not sure I notice any difference.

I'm friends with a small batch gelato maker. He mainly sells individual scoops, but he also sells pints. He started out using fully compostable pint containers, but their permeability leads to ice crystal formation while the product is stored. He's switched to more traditional pint containers, and the improvement is noticable.

Styrofoam is best, it's also horrible for the environment.

Styrofoam melts with hot foods and ruins the taste. It's one of the things I hate about take-out and why I rarely order take-out for any hot foods, because they always taste like plastic.

Consumer facing, maybe. I've worked with manufacturers in Europe and the amount of packaging they go through just receiving components from China (batteries, PCB) and other European countries is staggering. So much plastic just unwrapped and tossed. And later more packaging added.

People have no idea how little their personal choices and what they see in consumer facing products actually matter in the grand scheme of environmental impacts. Most of the efforts we see (plastic straws banned, caps that don't detach, "recycling") are just cosmetic. It's design to distract us from the real issue of industrial consumerism and preventing actual meaningful change.

I would love to see a comparison of the average amount of trash (especially plastic waste) the average American homeowner produces vs the average European homeowner. I bet the difference is astonishing.

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 hints at that with US at 2.5 times EU27 average CO2e production in 2022, trade-adjusted.

But probably everything-consumption is really high, with a toxic transportation system (sand for roads), land use, electronics use (rare earths), etc. Fucking up the planet is the easiest way to increase GDP.

It’s the multiple layers that get me. Frequently things are triple wrapped in plastic between underlying supplier(s) and amazon

Plastics has its merits on weather proofing sure but come on

Every single return Ive done or seen at my drop offs goes into a single use plastic bag + plastic from the tape they use. 99% of my items could ship in a paper bag and don't need plastic bubble wrap. The bubble bag or plastic bag is always completely oversized for the item. I could go on but I think everyone knows the same form their own experience with amazon.

The paper and cardboard products weigh more, which at Amazon scale means an incredible amount of fuel used. The trade offs aren’t cut and dry.

I've become more and more cynical about the incentives involved in recycling. There's not much transparency regarding what happens to to the various types of materials we all collect, sort and "recycle". Localities and countries compete to claim that they "recycle XX% of XYZ" but no-one's actually looking at what happens to the containers of XYZ once they're taken away from your recycling point.

"The European Union’s decision to ban exports of plastic waste in and outside Europe is threatening to collapse the market for the collection and recycling of plastic packaging"[0]

Although in this case banning exports of plastic waste might actually be the right thing to do, you do wonder* what was happening to all that plastic waste that was "recycled" over the decades.

[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/circular-materials/news/rec...

* Spoiler: much of it wasn't recycled at all...

In my county they banned the collection of any recycling that was bagged. So if you put your recycling in a bag to contain it, the garbage man won't pick it up. So now what happens is everyone puts their recycling loose in a blue bin and the wind blows all the bins over and scatters the recycling all over the neighborhood and eventually into the nearby ponds and ravines.

If you complain about the policy they tell you that it's because the recycling plant can't deal with the bags, it clogs up their machines. So in an age of automated assembly plants and advanced robotics the entire county here is at the mercy of a recycling plant that can't obtain a machine that can cut a bag open.

It just goes to show what a farce the whole program is. Now they're talking about making the rules even more restrictive, like using clear garbage bags so people won't put recycling in the garbage, even though that is going to increase the trash accumulating in the environment. It's a bureaucratic box-ticking and back-patting scheme.

> If you complain about the policy they tell you that it's because the recycling plant can't deal with the bags, it clogs up their machines[...]

Machines?! Most press photos that show the inside of plastic recycling sorting plants show a surprising number of Mk I human beings standing at a conveyor belt helping sort out the, err, rubbish.

Yeah, they could just hire some people for minimum wage to do it, but apparently that's too much to ask too, they would rather focus on vanity measures that will make things worse for the environment and more difficult for people to comply with, but will look good in a press release. This is the natural product of environmentalism and bureaucracy.

I remember when they put "frustration free packaging" on the agenda in a time when that was never talked about. Today they are the the slowest e-commerce company to ship packages to me except for Temu, even if I did pay a lot for a membership. I'm not expecting any innovation from them anymore, just Temu quality at 3x the price.

This feels like a comment that does not capture the actual Amazon userbase.

In my top 10 American city, Amazon delivers multiple slots same day, guaranteed no-extra-cost 2 day shipping, and offers a variety of 5-7 options that include digital rewards, local pickup, etc.

No competitor is in the same ballpark. Nearly every other e-commerce site I use, from small to large businesses, take 2 days to process the order and ship the dang thing and 4-6 more to arrive. Amazon ships in a matter of hours, and will even pay a driver uber-style to run it to your house immediately, for $3 extra. It's completely routine for me to shop from a small to medium business for my gardening hobby or photography hobby and wait 7-14 days for order processing and another 7-14 days for shipping. I waited 28 days for some camera filters, filters I chose to buy from the company instead of Amazon, even though they sold the same ones through Amazon on 2 day shipping. I waited 28 days!

Even for returns, Amazon operates return centers in all of my local Whole Foods, and they don't require boxing or labels. Every other e-commerce site I use makes me jump through hoops, find a printer, print a label, find a box, and then find the some random low-cost shipment center just to do a return. With Amazon, I show up with an unboxed product, they can my phone, and I'm out.

I recognize the level of harm Amazon does to society in a variety of ways, from their hostility to workers rights, their abusive use of contractors to reduce liability, their abuse of single use plastics and other pollutants, but on the topic of delivery speeds and customer experience, they are so far beyond any competitor that it's not even a comparison. Amazon has invented a style of e-commerce convenience that no competitor can rival at all.

Yea, the whole “Amazon takes forever to deliver” thing is something I literally _only_ see mentioned on HN, where for some reason it gets repeated a lot.

In real life, I can’t even remember the last time it took longer than 2 days to deliver something to me, and I’ve never heard of any of my friends, coworkers, or acquaintances complain about it. Everyone I know still loves Amazon because of how fast it is. There’s a weird disconnect here for some reason.

That’s because HN readers are geographically diverse.

I live about two hours from a major AMZN distribution hub, people I know who live an hour away work there. AMZN is always 5 days.

My hunch is that the criterion for fast shipping is close to “do you have a Cheesecake Factory in your town?”. If you’re in a large city with competitive shopping, AMZN wants to compete, if you live in a place which gets less attention from major retailers, AMZN goes with the herd.

It is no wonder why AMZN has premium service to NYC (Wouldn’t want Jim Cramer to say that AMZN is the slowest shipper) and Washington DC (If your congressman gets fast shipping he thinks his constituents do too) and Los Angeles (otherwise slow shipping from AMZN would be a running gag on all the sitcoms)

My friends and coworkers are geographically diverse as well. My original comment still stands.

Even my friend who lives in rural nowhere is one of those people who in the past has raved to me about how they order everything from Amazon because it’s even faster than going to the store. Parts of my family live about 3 hours from the closest big city and they still love Amazon as well.

There’s definitely got to be a geographic proximity factor to it and I’m definitely not saying your anecdote is invalid, but I find it very interesting that I’ve literally _never_ heard anyone in real life complain about Amazon shipping times, while I see it frequently on HN, to the point where if you only read HN you might think it was the majority viewpoint.

See

https://www.reddit.com/r/memphis/comments/zkmi7e/amazon_prim...

Even that thread is strange to me. There’s some people saying it takes 5-7 days to get delivery to Raleigh, while there’s also multiple people disagreeing saying they get 1-2 day delivery to east Memphis (less than 10 miles away).

That’s exactly what people are reporting. It’s hard to suss out exactly what is different about these areas but there’s no doubt that some people get much better service from Amazon than others.

They also don't bother to provide enough packaging to prevent the contents from being damaged in transit. It's absurd.

> I remember when they put "frustration free packaging" on the agenda in a time when that was never talked about.

But this isn't accurate at all; evil packaging was a topic of discussion before Amazon came out with "frustration free packaging". I remember buying something at Fry's and, knowing I would barely be able to open it, asking at checkout if they could open it for me. And they refused!

Here you can see some packaging criticism published several years before Amazon's effort: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/09/30/those-goddamn-...

From the commentary:

> When you buy a peripheral anymore, you might as well just get a jigsaw before you leave the mall. We don't lock up our prisoners this well. Why our gamepads and so forth must be hermetically sealed is beyond me - have they done something wrong? Is it for their own protection? If they don't want me to have the controller, and that's fine, maybe a better plan would be to keep it out of the store in the first place.

> Or, and this is a theory with some factual weight, perhaps the people that make these products stoke such a furnace of contempt for the consumer that good sense never enters the equation.

I think Amazon has two niches where it's still good.

* If you know exactly what name brand thing you want to buy Amazon is the best buying / return experience, usually the cheapest way to acquire it, and the fastest delivery.

* If you don't know exactly what you want it's a pretty good search engine on top of AliExpress. As soon as you see two of the same pictures you can get it for at least half the price buying direct.

> As soon as you see two of the same pictures you can get it for at least half the price buying direct.

I don't know about this. I've certainly seen a few cases where it was true, but the shipping cost always brought it back up to Amazon price levels, or the shipping time was so long that I was happier paying a bit more to get it sooner.

Maybe I'm just buying the wrong things...

Googling it, AliExpress still requires the item in its original packaging of you want to return it? If so, Amazon still dominates for anything worth returning. I can even drive the return item to the Whole foods down the street to return it at a dedicated Amazon kiosk.

While I agree on the packaging concerns, I live in a major US city and have lived in others and Amazon is by far the fastest shipper of any platform. I'd wager 95% of my purchases are delivered either the same day or the next and rarely have I had any issues. Very rarely do I have to wait more than 2 days for anything at all whereas that is the standard with any other shipper.

Obviously your mileage may vary depending on your location but this is echoed by many I know who live in major cities. There are no other options that can compete with that shipping time in my city.

Amazon can't seem to get anything to me in less than 4 days. Newegg and Walmart are usually 3 or sometimes 2 days. I'm under 150 miles from an Amazon distribution center but I'm not in or near a major city.

Yes it all depends on how close you are to a distribution center and how built-out their local delivery service is.

For me, most Amazon deliveries take 2-3 days and most often delivered with the US mail but lately I am seeing more Amazon vans (or unlabled white rental vans) so it may be changing.

In terms of weight, CO2 emissions, durability, and protecting the product, plastic is probably a lot better for the environment as a whole than a lot of “sustainable” packaging.

In the grand scheme of things plastic is a very minor part of our environmental problems - though it does have some nice pictures you can take. However, it seems to attract a bunch of people who think they prove their environmental commitment by irritating people as much as possible.

Multi-use plastic bags and paper bags are much more energy intensive to produce than single use plastic bags. Paper bags also fail at much higher rates (handles come out, small tears propagate rapidly, any moisture weakens it).

In addition, paper products such as straws and cups need to be coated for use with liquids. The coating (likely PFAS) is probably worse overall than if the straw or cup were just made out of plastic.

That depends on your delivery chain. For tumbling down a conveyor at a sorting center, getting thrown around, fall damage, cuts, slashes, sliding over rough surfaces, etc cardboard is vastly superior. For sitting out in the rain plastic is better.

It might just be that Amazon delivery chains in the US looks very different from most other places. A US package might never see the inside of a DHL sorting center, but spend a lot of time outside, making plastic a valid choice. A package in Europe on the other hand won't see more than two minutes of rain but a lot of rough handling designed for cardboard boxes, making plastic a suboptimal choice (even before environmental regulations)

There’s a lot of strange psychology at work in the plastics packaging media zeitgeist. It’s hard to think of comparable examples of stuff that matters so little in the grand scheme but gets so many people so bothered. People really really want to be heated over plastic packaging, all evidence indicating that it just doesn’t matter relative to our real environmental issues.

The word "probably" is doing a lot of lifting in this post.

A part of the reason might be how package delivery works in the US. In Germany a package delivery involves the courier seeing the receiver face-to-face and handing them the package (typically with a signature, but Amazon isn't as thorough there). As I understand it that is the norm globally.

In the US on the other hand a package delivery seems to consist of the the courier putting the package on the front porch, or even just throwing it on the property of the receiver. There it might be exposed to the elements for multiple hours, something cardboard boxes aren't good at.

In the scenario where packages are handed over face-to-face the advantages of plastic are pretty small and it's much easier to phase out. In the US the increase in plastic might just be a reaction to degrading delivery standards, which cause increased returns due to water-damaged products.

In the meantime, some online shops in Germany (not Amazon) are testing reusable plastic packaging (https://bp-consultants.de/en/reusable-bags-for-e-commerce-on...) - to return the empty package, just fold it and drop it into a mailbox.

I assume they've worked out that the fuel and other environmental impact of sending back all those packages via the mail service outweighs the impact of simply disposing of or recycling them locally?

They haven't, or otherwise they wouldn't be testing them. The energy required to make a new plastic or paper bag is also non-negligible. And, even if you put the bag in the trash, it still cause some environmental impact when it's transported and (hopefully) recycled.

At least around me (SE Michigan), I get the impression that "I obtain most things from Amazon, and buy at whim" has become a core part of many people's self-images and lifestyles. Which locks the Hypocrisy Lobes of their brains into Ring -2 Denial mode.

Hypocrisy in what? Denial of what? I don't think many consumers have made any sort of personal commitment to not use plastic.

Within SE Michigan, I live in small city where branding yourself as being pro-environment/anti-pollution seems very fashionable.

Similar for living in huge houses, and having several large SUV's, and indulging in regular long-distance air travel, and ...

In 2022 this was true, but today it is 2024 and I have noticed that Amazon has all but stopped sending me packages in plastic bags IN MY AREA.

IN MY AREA they seem to have switched to a new style of cardboard box that has a perforated seam along one side which aids in opening, and they appear to be closed with adhesive strips inside the flaps rather than tape. For smaller items they seem to have switched to paper mailers with some kind of shredded fabric for padding.

I bought like 10 different things in one order from Amazon the other day. I was hoping it would come in one big box; none of it was fragile and could easily have been packed that way. but no, it came in 10 different paper packaging.

End of the day all that plastic ends up in developing/undeveloped world. We should ban trash exports

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