Recycling

I was commenting on a post from When all is said … and I had an idea. Not necessarily an original idea, but it’s the first time it popped into my brain so I’m calling it my idea.

You see, I read a lot.

Not only do I read a lot but I buy a lot of books, mostly from Amazon.com. As a result I pretty much always have a stack of empty cardboard shipping boxes piled up in a corner, sometimes in my home office (mostly), sometimes in the kitchen (at the moment).

My idea is that Amazon should provide a reusable shipping carton that we can swap back and forth.

They could send me my monthly fix of books (aka, my regular order) in the reusable plastic carton then I could fold it down and return it empty just in time for the next month’s shipment.

Just think of all the cardboard, and the trees, that would be saved.

Even better, Amazon could provide the cartons printed on the inside with the “postage paid business reply” stuff needed so when returned to them empty it wouldn’t cost me a penny. But would they just up their shipping charges or the cost of books? Maybe, or maybe not. Anyway, the failing Postal Service could also benefit because they’d be getting paid for the mailing costs going both ways. Which is one more than they’re getting paid for at the moment.

Amazon would save tons of money because they wouldn’t have to keep buying loads of cardboard boxes. They would have to keep buying the reusable plastic cartons, though, because, let’s face it, even plastic wears out eventually. But, not as often as cardboard!

They wouldn’t have to send my books in my carton either. They could just send them in any old reusable plastic carton from anybody’s last book order. I mean, why would they want to have to keep up with which carton belongs to which customer?

The cartons would be printed on one side with the Amazon logo and a place to slap a shipping label. The other side could have the standard business reply mailer stuff. You know, the bar code, etc.

Now, if I could just figure out how to make reusable packing tape.

Hmmm …