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Comment by Areading314 | Hacker News Reader

I find that Amazon is one of the worst offenders. It's clear, especially for Amazon fresh orders, that they have zero incentive to care about their plastic footprint, and they take full advantage of this. Should be taxed or disincentivized.

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Ugh, I once got an amazon package that contained a product about the size of a toaster oven and it was shipped in the original manufacturer's box, nested in the box from whoever shipped the product to amazon, nested in the box amazon used to ship it. All the boxes were full of packing foam of course, so the total volume of the packaging after removing it was about a meter squared, or about 25x the volume of the product inside. It was extremely upsetting.

When you buy Amazon Fresh, if it contains anything cold, Amazon will include many packs to keep it cold. Our first time was a decently large order and it contained 8 (!) of such packs. They don't have a program to return these things. It's not just water inside but some other substance that shouldn't be casually thrown out. Suffice to say it was also our last order. I wouldn't say we're particularly more garbage-conscious than most but that was just absurd.

To me, that should be illegal without some kind of reuse program.

That scheme didn't last very long, and they've changed a couple times since then. For a while it was similar packs, but filled with water, and the pack said to just pour it down the drain. And now they send packs of dry ice along with frozen food, and frozen bottles of water along with refrigerated food. The dry ice just sublimates away (and the cardboard it's in is recyclable), and the bottled water is at least slightly valuable as a product.

>The dry ice just sublimates away

Dry ice is the solid form of carbon dioxide, though. So when it sublimates, the CO2 will go into the atmosphere.

Where do you think the CO2 came from in the first place?

From turtles (all the way down/up)? Heh.

Jokes apart:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_ice#Manufacture

The main point is that nobody produces (at industrial scale) CO2 just to make dry ice. It's a byproduct of other process that is normally released to the atmosphere, but in this case the release is delayed for a few days.

Usually from ammonia production, so from natural gas and water.

Found this use of it interesting (from the Wikipedia article about dry ice):

>Plumbers use equipment that forces pressurised liquid CO2 into a jacket around a pipe. The dry ice formed causes the water to freeze, forming an ice plug, allowing them to perform repairs without turning off the water mains. This technique can be used on pipes up to 4 inches (100 mm) in diameter.[23]

It's not like it's much CO2 though. Nearly as much is released by the truck driving to my house.

i love getting the frozen bottles of water with my amazon fresh purchase.

Most of the cold gel-packs actually are just water inside. We had one of the packs (with the little green gel beads) split open and our infant ate some of the beads, but when we called poison control they were like "Yeah, the beads are just tap water wrapped in plastic. The water's harmless, and the plastic will just pass through his digestive system. In rare cases the water can have bacteria in it, so watch out for signs of mild food poisoning, but otherwise he should be fine." I guess they individually wrap the water so that it can continue to conform to the shape of whatever you wrap it around, plus it melts more slowly and the temperature release is more controlled. Probably also helps them charge more if the customer believes it's some fancy chemical rather than just water - no manufacturer ever says exactly what's in their cold packs.

Not exactly great for the environment (how does an ice pack manage to have more plastic inside than the entire rest of the packaging?), but yes, you can casually throw them out. Also a brilliant example of marketing and customer deception.

This may not have always been the case, per the other reply to this comment. In my experience that is correct, because we cut them open and there was no such beads, just an opaque gel that, while could've been simply water, didn't seem like it (I've never seen "pure" water in a gelatinous form). I only recall reading that it was drain-safe, so maybe that supports the water theory (though we put much more than water down drains), or at least some mostly-safe substance.

The good news is cardboard is one of the most valuable recyclables, and I think packaging peanuts are reusable if you drop them off at a postal place.

There's problems with just reusing packing peanuts, too.

I have no idea where I could drop them for reuse, or how I'd even look that up local to me. Then how many do I need to take in one trip to be make sense, carbon-wise, for me to make the drive over? I bet it's an awful lot, and I don't really have a place to store packing peanuts for 2 years while I accumulate enough to be worth the trip

Dunno what to do if you can’t accumulate.

But if you can, just post an ad on your local classified.

Some Ebayer will gladly jam garbage bags of them into their car.

Carbon pollution isn't the only think to consider, but also ther physical pollution of that instead being put in the garbage (and it's decomposable).

I ordered a bathroom rug and they shipped it in a box that would fit the rug unfolded....lol.

As an example for recycling: the grocery deliverable service I use (picnic) charges 35 ct as a deposit for the plastic bags which gets refunded if you give them back the next delivery. They are bio decomposable but they want them back anyways.

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