Personally, I take full credit for Amazon’s new “Frustration-Free” packaging, as it was I who came up with a list of environmental suggestions for Amazon this summer. Today they announced a new multi-year initiative. They made a fun video which shows some of the benefits.
In short: all of the incredible packaging created only to make products good for store retail are removed and replaced with packaging optimized for shipping. (more…)
Amazon Green
I hope they continue to make attempts to improve their shipping practices. They do claim that their packaging is “right sized” and mostly made of recycled materials, but they have to be able to do better. As one of the country’s (world?) leading online retailers, they should have some power.
Here’s my list of suggestions: (more…)
There’s a kind of plastic packaging that I have injured myself with several times. This is intentional on the part of marketers — when packaged for retail, shoplifting is much harder.
But I buy a lot of stuff online. (In fact, I get a sick feeling in my stomach when I enter almost any big-box retail store. They never have what I need, they try to sell me junk I don’t need, and I occasionally settle for an inferior alternative to what I want out of frustration.) Why can’t the five percent of items needed for retail display be packaged in this way, and the rest be packaged efficiently? (more…)
Paper or Plastic? According to one article, the right answer seems to be “more vegetables.” The TerraPass blog did a very interesting article based on a study comparing the embedded energy of
Their conclusion is simple: a meat diet is 186 times more energy intensive than the plastic bags used to carry it home. Paper bags were judged to be worse than plastic, meat worse than vegetables.
But, this is the wrong conclusion to draw from the facts.
I am of two minds when seeing articles like this. (more…)
