Shipping and Handling

As broke college students, access to a car and your mom’s famous cookies are often hard to find. Luckily, everything from textbooks to teddy bears can be shipped right to your dormitory in a matter of days. Whether packaged in cardboard boxes, or bubble mailers, these items arrive, then produce a pile of trash sitting beside your trash can until you take it out of your room.

College packages are just a small example of a much larger issue. Mail waste is a single use issue that is often unnoticed, because once it arrives, the materials are simply discarded, because they appear difficult to reuse. They represent a huge single-use problem which continues to grow. Back in 2013, Amazon alone shipped over608 million packagesa day (that’s 1.5 million packages every single day!). 9.2 billiontons of plastic have been produced, of which only 9 percent has been recycled properly.

The easy question to ask is why not just recycle the packaging we receive? But there are tons of reasons why this is a problematic approach to the shipping waste problem. For starters, waste management in general is expensive. Since many people see waste as a negative career path, finding the right people to handle waste is extremely expensive. The waste management systems, such as landfills are costly to maintain, because they need to comply with local and national legislations. They often require oversight, which if ignored can be damaging to local ecosystems and communities.

As of now, 91 percent of packaging waste is sent directly to landfills or discarded into the environment. These materials are created using harmful natural resources such as crude oil, natural gas and coal, all of which harm the environment to extract and use. They require a massive amount of energy to produce, and produce harmful toxins while being created and while disintegrating.

However, all hope is not lost for shipping in the future. Eco-friendly packaging alternatives have been created, yet are still rarely used.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

1. Reach out to producers! Amazon’s Customer service team, which can be reached at cs-reply@amazon.com, can provide minimal waste packaging per request. Sample messages include: “I’m requesting minimal packaging for the shipping of my Amazon packages. Please avoid plastic packaging wherever necessary, including packing peanuts in my future orders. Thank you!". Amazon also provides “Frustration free” packaging, which helps users avoid receiving one box in a larger Amazon box.

2. Comment and Provide Feedback! Companies often operate under the lowest cost model. If consumers have problems with orders, you can make a change to a larger system.

3. Group your orders: If you don’t need something right away, a larger package with multiple items can save on the carbon impact of delivery as well as the waste of shipping it!

4. Buy Less! Not only do you save money, but you will be able to better support local businesses that sell similar items.

5. Save boxes and re-use them: Whether you are looking to return items, or not, you can save boxes and re-use them! This will also save you time in the long run, because if you need to ship something, you will already have the materials you need.