They've been actively working on that for almost a decade [1]. Most (all?) cushioning in my packages is now heavy brown paper or plastic air bags, a significant improvement from the days of packing peanuts and bubble wrap. I'd like to see the air bags go away too.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/zhr3q9mgfqub33r

Yeah I was refering to air bags.

I received an order of towels from Amazon in a too-large box, filled with air bags. For towels.

The manufacturer has a program to recycle them:

https://sealedair.com/product-care/recycling-bubble-wrap-pla...

You can also use Amazon boxes to donate used clothes and household items:

http://givebackbox.com/amazon

givebackbox is cool.

Took a look at sealedair's 'program'. I could be wrong, but it looks like it's just links to other organizations' directories of local recycling programs; most of which are retail stores. Here's why I don't trust retail stores (Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowes, Safeway, etc...): while they do a great job of marketing their 'recycling programs' most of what we put into their recycle bins just end up in their normal dumpsters which defeats the purpose.

No, it says to send it back to them:

> The deflated cells can be sent to any of a number of Sealed Air locations where they will be recycled back into LDPE

If you're in the US, send them here:

  Ameri-Pak, Inc.
  Sealed Air Recycle Center
  477 South Woods Dr.
  Fountain Inn, South Carolina 29644

That's not a good program... but it's better than nothing.

The problem is, if you want to cheaply ship cheap stuff quickly, you need to reduce costs. So no time to have your packers pick from 20 sizes of boxes; just toss everything in a huge box. No time to handle returns of broken shipments; just stuff those huge boxes with tons of air bags. No time to actually check what's in the boxes (towels or a vase) because you need to pack 200 boxes an hour to break even.

If "we" want to stop trashing the world, first we need to show we are willing to pay for that.

> If "we" want to stop trashing the world, first we need to show we are willing to pay for that.

This is the typical supply-side dodge. Consumers have little to no power here. I can't dictate to Amazon or major shipping companies (I do buy AMZN's frustration-free when I can).

What option is there? Do you propose I compete with the packaging with my own offering?

Wouldn't this paraphrase as "I have no power, so I will continue financially supporting them." ?

Consumers blame suppliers, suppliers blame consumers. No one has to do anything. Long live the status quo! :)

> suppliers blame consumers

That's the dodge right there. Easy as a supplier to simply say "we provide what the consumer wants" to justify all business decisions. Courage, that is.

This is normally where the government or watchdog organizations get involved - those have been gutted or defanged in the past few decades... by business interest group lobbying.

Maybe the boxes could be foldable, or easily and space-efficiently stackable.

Not just Amazon... almost all delivery services (pharmacy, google shopping express, etc)

The sole exception I found was amazingly, Safeway's grocery delivery service where the person showed up with a box, walked in, unloaded in my kitchen then took the box with him. Of course, you need to be present for that, but something equivalent for non-perishable delivery would be a huge sanity saver for me.

That's nice, I was not aware that UPS would take them. My local grocery store have a program for plastic bags, but reusing them is of course much more efficient.

I could be wrong but lot of these shipping stores are franchises, so it probably depends on the owner.

> then I give it to a local UPS store to reuse

Nice one! I hadn't thought of this, but I'll start doing it now.

You can't recycle the air bags?