The following entries were tagged with “waste”. They are displayed with the most recent entries first. (1–1)

Reusable Postage Containers

Posted in , , , and on Sun, 06th Apr 2008 at 23:36

How much cardboard and other materials are used every day in shipping packages around the country and around the world? How much of that it reused or recycled, versus what's just chucked in a landfill? I don't know the answers to those questions but if I did I imagine it would make me a sad panda.

Wouldn't it be cool if we did to postage what we have done to shopping bags? Replace one-use containers with more durable, reusable ones. They'd be more expensive than what we use now, but that expense would be spread out over multiple uses rather than just tearing the box off and chucking it on an ever-growing pile of trash. I imagine that if there were standards of size, shape, and weight it would even make it easier for the postal system to deal with packages, compared to having to deal with all manner of shapes and sizes now.

Ok, so there are some obvious difficulties here, and I'm sure a whole host of non-obvious ones. There's the initial outlay, the solution to which is to grin and bear it. More damning is the problem that people on the receiving end would not necessarily be motivated to do anything but discard the newer packaging just as they do now, so there would need to be some sort of incentive system. That's doubly so because most people only ever receive parcels and never send them, so there's no natural way for the packaging to get back out into the system. You'd have to go to the post office to drop it off, or have it collected. Reimbursement for returned parcels, like they used to do with glass soda bottles? Who knows.

Problems aside, I think it's at least worth thinking about this problem now that people are much more concerned than before about waste, and now that a lot of commerce is taking place on the Web so there are more parcels being delivered now than ever before.

Comments:
Mon, 07th Apr 2008 (07:55)

don't we send it all for (non economically viable) recycling anyway?

even if we didn't, packaging is from largely recycled material, and most paper is from sustainable forestry.

What's the big deal?

by SJ
Mon, 07th Apr 2008 (08:44)

Don't forget the countless tons of plastic and polystyrene that go straight on the landfill. I also wouldn't be so confident as to assume that the majority of the paper and cardboard packaging is recycled.

Incidentally, the economy has failed to collapse in the decades that we've been recycling. In what sense is it economically nonviable?

by Rory
Mon, 07th Apr 2008 (09:54)

Studies I've read show that about 70-80% of paper and cardboard is recycled (US-centric, es ever)

As a standalone operation, the recycling of stuff other than aluminium is not viable - it costs more to make poorer quality recycled paper (for example) than it does to make new stuff. It often uses more energy too. It's subsidised by the State.

Recycling plastic seems to be more environmentally friendly than just chucking it, and obviously supplies of hydrocarbons are finite; but with paper, that's a harder case to make. Most stuff that I receive in parcels is packaged predominantly in paper.

I guess what I am trying to say is that it's really not a big deal. In Ireland; a large part of the pro-recycling lobby is based on an irrational hatred of landfills, despite the fact that landfill is cheap, efficient and when it's managed right (ie according to EU Directives), it's pretty environmentally sound. I've played football on plenty of old landfills.

There was an episode of 'bullsh*t' about the issue. As ever, Penn and Teller are less than even-handed, and should be taken with a grain of salt; but I found that they made a reasonable case: try here, possibly: http://www.videosift.com/video/Penn-Teller-Bullshit-Recycling

by SJ
Mon, 07th Apr 2008 (10:08)

I stand corrected - according to Wiki, In 2004, the paper recycling rate in Europe was 54.6% or 45.5 million tons.

The 70-80% figures relate to the percentage of packaging that is made from paper that has already been recycled. The only figures I can find on the web at the moment relate to Canada - "Almost 90 percent of all paper-based packaging produced in Canada is made from recycled fibre or wood residues"

http://www.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/fi-if.nsf/en/fb00064e.html

I'm sure Canada is much better than the US and Europe, but 70-80% seems realistic to me.

by SJ