My New Years Resolution this year was to cut back on the amount of waste plastic I was pumping into the environment. This requires some thought and some research. In this installment I tackle the Amazon question. Amazon appears to be trying to reduce excess packaging in the products they ship. Probably not out of the goodness of their corporate heart, but because it simultaneously makes a good impression on their customers and saves them money. I don't really care so much about their motivations - I just want to know if it's true that, as they claim, all of their packaging is recyclable. 

They have a nice page on their website that lists all their product packaging in picture form. When you click on a picture, a popup box tells you what it is and how to recycle it. Okay, that's actually pretty cool. Ignoring the Grocery Delivery section, I clicked through all the Amazon.com packaging items, and damn, I think they're telling the truth (mostly). All of their current product packaging is either paper, cardboard, or plastic film. Paper and cardboard all go into what they call "curbside recycling." The only issue here is that you are supposed to remove the tape from boxes, which isn't that hard. 

But the plastic is what I came here to research, because there are so many kinds of plastic involved - mailing envelopes, plastic bags, and those ubiquitous air pillows. For all of them the popup box is the same: "Some cities offer curbside recycling. Where not available, use designated store drop-off locations where plastic film is accepted. Find your drop off location." And guess what! That link works. I entered my zip code and every grocery store in Minneapolis popped up. Nice. Now if you are asking yourself whether grocery store plastics collections are REALLY recycled or if they just throw them in the trash, I tackled that topic last year.  tldr; yes the bags from Cub get picked up by an outfit called Trex that turns them into "wood-alternative decking products."  

THEN THERE'S AMAZON'S FRUSTRATION-FREE PACKAGING INITIATIVE
This program was hard to understand. It appears to be aimed partly at cutting back on packaging and partly at simply making the packaging that is there easier to open. Both laudable goals, but how does the customer request it? Well, you can't exactly request it because it's only available for a subset of Amazon products. That's because it's a certification program that Amazon established with their third-party sellers where the sellers agree to package their products in a way that is sturdy enough to send through the mail as well as using less packaging and being easy to open. If the product you are ordering has that option available it is selected by default at checkout. And how do you, the customer, know that? Because there is a little disclaimer that says “Item arrives in packaging that reveals what’s inside.” You can opt out of that by changing it to "Ship in Amazon packaging." Which is admittedly a little confusing, but I guess it makes sense. Why would anyone want to opt OUT of Frustration Free Packaging? The most likely reason is because the buyer wants to keep the contents of the package a mystery when it arrives, so they want that nice FFP box to be hidden inside an Amazon box. 

It is possible to filter your product search to look only for FFP items, but most of the time you won't find what you're looking for if you do that because only a minority of products on the site are certified for FFP.  If you start ordering eco-friendly things on Amazon, you're more likely to see this option pop up. I just saw it for the first time when I ordered a shampoo bar (no plastic bottle). 

ETA: Oh, right I forgot to mention the exceptions to the "EVERYTHING is recyclable" claim. In the Amazon.com section the only non-recyclable is the paper mailer with air bubble padding. Plastic mailer with air bubbles is recyclable as plastic; paper mailer with paper padding is recyclable as paper; but the hybrid case breaks the system. And there are some oddball insulated doohickeys in the grocery delivery section that are just flat-out non-recyclable and probably toxic. So before you order a food item that must be heat insulated, check here. Surprisingly, it IS possible recycle the Ice Cream Pouch, but it looks like a lot of trouble. 

For many years I industriously gathered together all my plastic bag products and dropped them off at Cub Foods, and kept doing it for quite a while after China stopped taking our plastic refuse and grocery stores reportedly stopped actually recycling plastic film. There is no way to actually tell what is going on with plastic by looking at Official Online Sources, which clearly haven't updated the verbiage on their plastic film recycling page for decades and are still unintentionally promoting a lot of wish-cycling. So gradually I just started throwing plastic bags in the trash. But there is still a big bag of them on the front porch so I decided to do a more in depth search to see if it was worthwhile hauling them down to the grocery store.

The answer seems to be "Yes." Apparently grocery stores are recycling plastic bags again for real, not just wish-cycling. At least according to this website, which seems to be written by someone who knows what he is talking about. He does more than just assert that stores are recycling; he provides a link to Trex, the world's largest manufacturer of wood-alternative decking products, which lists all the stores they pick up from in each state!   And sure enough, there is Cub Foods listed for Minnesota. Okay, that is sufficiently specific to be believable. So that bag of bags is headed for Cub.