Featured Amazon orders 100k delivery vans from Rivian

'on friday, 1500 amazon employees plan to walk out over amazons environmental impact' - vox

 

Absolutely, but Amazon has around a trillion dollar valuation. They absolutely because of their investment know that the rivian battery pack and skateboard design will work for these delivery vans. Will rivian be able to do it, or will it end up the mirai or the fisker karma? We don't know. But if rivian does it, amazon will probably triple or more their investment, if they don't they lose their investment, but can still buy these from someone else like tesla or ford that are will be able to do it on a longer timetable. I think the chances of this happening are more than 50%, so IMHO its a good bet.

Exactly so this is a talking point by management on reducing the impact. Now if they used less packing material ;-)

 

1500 new job openings.

 

I’d love to see them switch over to straight up reusable boxes. I can’t think of any reason why they could not get a “fleet” of corrugated plastic boxes and run them back and forth hundreds of times before recycling. Maybe it costs more? I’m willing to pay a share of it, knowing that they’ll apply massive scale and process efficiency.

 

The pet store chain I worked for did this, but we had a truck regularly making deliveries with would otherwise be empty space to take the boxes back.

It would cost more for Amazon to do this, and that extra cost would be in burnt fuel collecting the boxes up peoples homes. Less fuel would be used with people gathering up all their cardboard for recycling.

Another consideration for Amazon or other company is that those boxes we had got beat. I can see many customers getting their goods in a battered box finding it unacceptable. So would the boxes see enough uses before replacing to justify the cost in fuel and sorting them?

 

That is a great idea and would certainly work when Amazon gets to the point of doing a large portion of the deliveries themselves. They could even provide the customer with some sort of small incentive to 'return' the boxes. Frankly, I'm somewhat embarrassed by the amount of cardboard waste we produce as we order from Amazon ( and others ) a LOT. I can only hope the boxes are *actually* being recycled. I have heard that many municipalities are putting recyclables into the trash lately even though they distribute recycling bins.

 

Also of note is that Amazon effectively owns Rivian it would be foolish not to use their clout to “sell Rivian

 

We don't need more indestructible non-biodegradable plastic.
Yes, all the cardboard isn't good. But even cardboard that could be used 5 or 10 times would be better than plastic.
The hard part is collecting them.
And you'd think they could be better at picking the right size package and knowing how fragile or not the contents are to adjust the packing material

Mike

 

The suggestion was for reusing the cardboard box.

At least there is a less packaging option for some goods.

 

My recycling has a specific bin for all those flattened cardboard boxes. And my local Walmart just got a bin for all those plastic bags we get. Aside from Costco who uses their boxes for packaging customer's orders at the checkout, most grocery stores recycle all the case boxes they get.

 

I suppose in the end, I don’t care too much whether the packaging is cardboard or plastic.

What I do know is that recycling in the USA effectively ended last year, so we all need to stop pretending that it’s helping.

The chinese got sick of accepting materials that weren’t properly sorted or clean enough to eat off of, and (apparently) it really does need to be sorted perfectly and that clean for proper recycling. Even then, recycled materials tends to require considerable virgin material input, so there’s a fairly low limit on how much can be turned around anyway.

Which is easier? Washing plastic containers as well as your dishes and removing labels and packing tape from cardboard boxes, or just handing the container back to the delivery guy when he makes his next drop-off?

Single-use packaging sends a message that we have all chosen to ignore: “We don’t expect you’ll ever be back for more."

 

Read the quote in my message again... It says reusable corrugated PLASTIC boxes

Mike

 

If it is cardboard, reusable or single use, at least it eventually degrades.
If it is plastic it lasts ~forever.

Check out the 60 minutes episode on remote parts of the ocean and how the plastic accumulates
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Cleaning up the plastic in the ocean - 60 Minutes - CBS News

Mike

 

I'm just curious... are you being cheeky, or can you provide evidence to this statement?

 

…and what I’m getting at is that “lasts forever” is actually a positive quality when the material is doing a useful job over and over again.

The post office used to rent me a box where I collected mail.

I want Amazon to rent me a box that goes back and forth between their warehouse and my house. Same box every time, at least until I order something that won’t fit in it.

By now they’ve seen years of my purchasing habits. They know what size that box should be for delivering most of what I buy. They can stencil my name and address on it so there’s no more paper/ink/adhesive involved. Leave the air pillows in there so they can use them for the next run.

Nothing to recycle and nothing headed for the landfill.

As it is, I buy quite a lot from them- saves me time, keeps miles off the car, and I’m not limited to local inventory selection in my small town. Of note: there is no retail to speak of in the town I call home, so I’m not cutting out my neighbors or the township tax base.

 

Most recyclables get trashed or incerated due to lack of market

 

they still charge less here to haul recyclables vs straight trash. not sure why

 

google is your friend

 

Amazon as a server farm is very profitable

Amazon as well anything other than that is a total failure (remembering that the only metric for success is profits)

Despite all of Amazons hype, any grocery store or farm market booth or brick and mortar is more efficient/equitable by any metric you wish to compare to than Amazon,

Amazons goods travel more distance, with more packaging, with more spoilage/damage with more infrastructural overhead by the lowest bidder at every turn.

Amazon trades what appears to be convience for everything including profits.

If fuel or infrastructure were to be charged to
Amazon at its actual cost, it would likely fold or become dramatically more expensive.

As currently structured Amazon is not sustainable unless all other competitors go bankrupt. Eventually the piper will need to be paid if their desirable infrastructure and platform loose favor as they are forced to earn profits.

 

Our company pays many of our customers to collect, then periodically ship our packaging back to us for reuse. This actually saves us thousands of dollars each year.