packing-peanuts

Photo Credit: ThrasherDave

When I worked at JustUs Coffee, I had a coworker who was quite vocal about his hatred of Styrofoam packing peanuts. We were a production facility in the middle of major steady expansion, so we ended up receiving packaged equipment quite often. My hatred for packing peanuts was increased several fold when I opened up a box that contained a sample roaster that had gone away for repairs. It was resting in quite repose in a bed of expanded polystyrene peanuts. All of its nooks and crannies were also filled with little crumbs of the stuff. This is a device that I was to use for roasting 100g samples of coffee for taste testing. Burnt expanded polystyrene probably doesn’t taste very good. I don’t know because I spent an hour carefully removing the stuff.

As an environmentally conscious business, we had a policy of saving packaging for recycling or reuse. Those peanuts were sometimes a big time suck. JustUs is also a retailer of Bodum Coffee Presses and other delicate things, so the peanuts came in handy before Christmas.

Other businesses and households might not have a practical way to reuse all the packing peanuts that show up at their doors. This can be a problem since most recycling programs don’t want them. They are designed to take up space and if you are saving them to avoid sending them to the landfill, you soon find out just how effective they are at taking up space. If you have some saved up, you can punch your postal code into a form on Loosefillpackaging.com to find the nearest Styrofoam Peanut Drop Off Center.

Some companies are responsive to requests for alternative packaging. It is always worth a try.

Buying used items locally and picking them up yourself pretty much guarantees that you won’t be bringing home any packing peanuts.

 Retweet This Post