Amazon Eliminates Single-use Plastic in Packaging in India 23
Amazon said on Monday it has eliminated all single-use plastic in its packaging across its fulfillment centers in India, delivering on a pledge it made last year to achieve this goal by June. From a report: The American e-commerce group said it had replaced packaging materials such as bubble wraps with paper cushions and was also using "100% plastic-free biodegradable" paper tapes. All of Amazon's 50-plus fulfilment centers in India, one of its key overseas markets, were complying with the new guidelines, the company said. Flipkart, which had made a similar pledge last year, said last month that its reliance on single-use plastic across its supply chain had dropped by 50%. Last year, the Walmart-owned marketplace said it intended to move entirely to recycled plastic consumption in its supply chain by March 2021. Amazon's announcement Monday follows Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's directive last year, when he urged Indians to put an end to usage of single-use plastic by 2022. India has been grappling with a major plastic waste problem for several years. Asia's third-largest economy is struggling with disposing of the 9.4 million tons of plastic waste it generates each year. Dozens of nations across the world have in recent years moved to address this challenge by imposing curbs and levies on use of single-use plastic.
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon, now that you have proved that you can do it in India, do it for the other countries on the planet too.
Now only if India could... (Score:1)
...eliminate fecal elimination and tossing corpses into the Ganges, maybe that stinking shithole could become a tiny bit more habitable.
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Now only if India could eliminate ... tossing corpses into the Ganges, ...
I thought the drill was to burn the corpses and toss the ashes into the Ganges. Is this far enough from universal to be an issue?
Plastic locks carbon in (Score:2)
Might not be a good thing. Fossil hydrocarbons (oil) that is not turned into plastic is burned as fuel and ends up in the atmosphere. Plastic may be a way of locking that carbon away from ending up in the atmosphere. Think about it.
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This unlikely to be a net problem, as their replacement in this case is paper cushions. Which come from trees, which in turn capture and sequester carbon from atmosphere.
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Paper Trees can come from plants that grows fast, so you cut them down, grow new ones, Also it can come from wood scraps from other activities that needs wood. Working with wood is actually very wasteful. I have a lot of scrap pieces of wood that is too small or odd shape to use again. So I will usually just burn it. Also a normal saw blade would cut 1/8th of an inch of the material and turn it into sawdust.
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I'm not sure how any of these factoids addresses the point I made.
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Or we can just reduce the drilling and leave the oil in the ground.
Plastic isn't necessarily bad it is a wonderful material. However its use in single use products has gone overboard. Lets say you get a MicoSD card for your phone. The blister pack packaging is more massive than the SD Card itself. Where it could had been just as easily stored in a paper or cardboard envelope.
The amount of oil we use is based on the demand that we have for it. If there is less demand, the less we need to drill up.
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No humans won't leave the oil in the ground. If it's sitting there --it's energy and it's worth money .. it looks too tempting, good. People will extract the oil like flies are drawn to shit.
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I would be happy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Big Plastic is behind it.
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How relevant to the scope of the problem? (Score:2)
These actions when observed individually are interesting, but they raise a massive question: how relevant are they to solving the problem?
In case of countries in East and South Asia, the reason why they pollute as much as they do has to do with earnings and consumption culture, not e-commerce. Here in the West, much of the packaging is for items that are supposed to be used many times. A bottle of shampoo is expected to be used several tens of times at least. In East and South Asia, this not not so. In nati
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I have heard that in India people are more likely to just throw trash on the ground than put it in the can. I've never been there, but from the travelogues and documentaries I've seen, it seem likely. Not disposing of it properly would seem to have a big impact - Put it in a can and it's less likely to end up in the water.
I wonder how much of that has to do with the culture having a class of Untouchables whose purpose in life was to, for lack of a better term, shovel shit?
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You'll find same in China, Vietnam and Philippines. It's less about caste system and more about the fact that no one cares. Including the garbage collectors, who will often dump the trash in the cans straight into said rivers because it may save them ten minutes off the trip to the landfill.
Most Westerners are simply too used to the "everything works as it should" and "most people follow rules without being forced to do so and monitored every step of the way to ensure compliance". In most of the world, both
what about the rest of the world (Score:1)
they need to do that every where the last ime i ordered had more palstic filler packaging that 2 small items combined (exaggeration but that is how it felt)
Re: Necessary in the 3rd World (Score:2)
In 2006 I was in Bangalore. Areas were choked with rafts of plastic: bags, wrappers, random packaging, and beverage bottles. All of the water that I drank there was from single use plastic bottles, apart from some in
Great for COVID-19 safety. (Score:2)
One issue with Amazon (and other) deliveries is whether they've been handled - or breathed or sneezed near - by someone with COVID-19. Sure the workers are supposed to be masked and gloved. But why bet your life that all the under-pressure workers in the supply chain didn't slip up, and that no neighborhood kid came by and sneezed while the deliveryperson was carrying the box up the sidewalk, or while it was sitting on the porch?
Especially since you're making that bet over and over with every package, and