I hope your not refering to the systainer has packaging 

I think you might be referring to retail packaging (claim shells).  They probably could go to cardboard, I don't think a dealer would care, but now you will have people opening those boxes to see the part.  Festool all ready uses very cheap plastic on those, most items show up in broken plastic shells.

I'd say in general they use very little packaging. I have to re-pack stuff that comes in systainers as everything inside is tossed, and when they ship them, they come in simple cardboard boxes, which is good.  Given folks get stuff that shows up damaged, I don't think they are over doing it. Some items I have got had no packaging at all, the dealer just tossed it in a box in the mail.

Request to Festool: please cut down on your use of plastic packaging. I just received several vacuum parts, and each one is in a rigid plastic package. Why not put them in cardboard? There were even wrapped in plastic bags inside the plastic package. And the parts were plastic and stainless steel, so it's not like they could get water damage. Same for splinter guards. How about a cardboard box for them?
Thank you.

Cardboard is actually WAY LESS environmentally friendly than the minimum-weight plastic molds Festool uses.

That is, unless you plan to throw it out somewhere in the forest where the paper will rot while plastics will not. But you are not planning that, are you ?

And yes, Festool is notorious to under-package.
My CTM came with a broken wheel as there was simply not enough wiggle room when the shippers threw the heavy box around...

Locally, the tools sometimes ship directly in Systainers on a palette. No further packaging, just a wrap to hold the stacks. I am not sure one can get more barebones than that.

Not sure about your region, but in the United States not everyone has recycling services available. Thankfully, I'm currently in a city that has a really good recycling program as part of the trash collection.

You do not need recycle anything. Just put stuff to garbage collection instead of dumping it in the near forest/river/sea.

Recycling generic plastics is actually mostly ineffective. More energy is consumed to recycle them that would cost to make new stuff from scratch. It is much better to just burn instead of natural fuels as they are an excellent fuel. And make new from oil instead of burning the oil ..

Ideally, you will burn plastics along with other waste for electricity/heat but even storing it on a dump to be burned later, a century later, is fine.

The only real problem with basic carbon-hydrogen-oxygen style plastics is when people throw them out to the nature as it persists there.

Ideally, you will burn plastics along with other waste for electricity/heat but even storing it on a dump to be burned later, a century later, is fine.

There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING good about burning plastic.

When you burn them at high temperature (i.e. NOT at home furnace) of >1000 C, all the energy stored in them is released and the end products are only CO2 an H20. The same as when you burn (pure) natural gas etc.

Ok, joke, right?

So you're saying, with your chemical engineering background, there are only C,H, and O molecules in plastic? But not that there are countless types of additives to make plastic do better what you want?

Second, with your chemical engineering background, it is of course possible to ALWAYS get a perfect burn, and not have any partial burns, anytime? Real life engineers know better. There is no perfect burn, anywhere, anytime. Doesn't matter so much if it was just one fire burning, but multiply this for almost 8 billion people, and it adds up.

And lastly, and MOSTLY, it is simply a big waste to just destroy plastic while it is a very good material to recycle. Thought of that?

I agree. Packaging is one thing I notice a lot about companies. Sadly not many companies impress me.

Ikea is the worst, it is simply amazing with how much paper, carton and plastic you end up with for a single shelf.

Just a curiosity question ---------   does Ikea make their own packaging from their own forests?  Like the source of wood for their furniture?



Seth

Just a curiosity question ---------   does Ikea make their own packaging from their own forests?  Like the source of wood for their furniture?

I have no clue. I just assemble their products from time to time. As every item (door, shelve, cabinet, drawer, slides, grips, legs, hinges) can be ordered separately and is packaged separately, one single cabinet leaves a mountain of packaging material.

As for landfills, that's outdated. Or should be. And it is even more wasteful than burning because you get no energy back. Here in Holland we have no landfills anymore, everything that can be recycled is recycled, and the rest is burned. Here garbage is actually worth money.
 

I have noticed that part of this discussion centers around the idea that plastic is either burned, recycled, or thrown into the woods. But in the USA  much of it still ends up in a landfill with all the rest of peoples trash and garbage. That puts a different perspective on some of the debate about which is better  -- cardboard or plastic?

Seth

A properly managed landfill is not a problem. Certainly not for plastics/paper which are pretty much inert. You can process it 100 years later and all will be fine.
The problem is with toxic chemicals going to the landfill - like stains, those "nice color" in the magazine etc.

Plain polycarbonate or a plain cardboard at a landfill is a non-issue as far as the health of the environment is concerned. An aluminum can is a couple orders of magnitude bigger issue and that is only the start.

Quote from: DeformedTree on March 03, 2021, 11:39 AM

IKEA is good overall, they don't make a mess of their cardboard, it's clean for recycling.  When you consider how much mass they are shipping, and how much smaller it is by being flat packed, it's a win. They have the thin foam separators, and sometimes the plastic wrap they use on parts.  But folks don't want their stuff scratched or damaged either.  Yeah you can have a lot of boxes when you complete assembling something from IKEA, but just picture what it would be like if it didn't come flat packed. Shipping a bookcase whole would be so much worse.

I think most of Ikea's flat-packed furniture also has something in the description along the lines of "can be reclaimed for energy at end of life" or something to that effect.  I remember first reading that about a dozen years ago and thinking "that's an interesting way to say 'you can burn this for heat when you're done sitting on it'".

Basically any of their wood furniture says "can be burned for heat" for the environmental friendly aspect.   They are not wrong, assuming you don't add finish and such.  Folks in Texas recently put this to use.  But this is the general issue with a lot of products, is paints, finishes, etc that turn it into a waste product.

...
Here in Holland we have no landfills anymore, everything that can be recycled is recycled, and the rest is burned. Here garbage is actually worth money.

What’s the output from the incinerator? Steam for electric generators? Free heat in the winter?

None of my concern at all other than I want sufficient packaging to get whatever I buy to arrive in one piece. Better to err on the side of too much packaging.

People want stuff to come un-damaged, and they want minimal packaging, companies can't win.

Buying stuff in person is the best way to cut down on packaging, and what packaging is used in the bulk shipping is more likely to hit a recycling system, A businesses bailing up cardboard verses hoping a person has curbside pickup, or a pallet that gets re-used verses more boxes, or 1 big box verses lots of smaller boxes.

Expanding recycling doesn't really work. It just adds to the problems. People have gotten into the idea that if they can put it in recycling, all is good.  But again, a lot of what goes into recycling programs (stuff put to curb by folks), still ends up in a dump or an incinerator as programs can't handle that material, or there simply is no market for it. Putting energy into separating, cleaning, moving around, material separate from trash, just to dump it back in with trash because there is no use/market for the material is a greater waste of energy than just sending it to the trash direct.

Letting people think cardboard is fine because they put it in there recycling makes them blind to the issues that we shouldn't be generating massive amounts of cardboard.  Folks buying online and having stuff shipped to their door in packaging, when it's stuff they could just go to the corner store and buy is massive waste. Talking about groceries and similar house hold consumables.

Saying that plastic is more environmentally friendly is a lie.

"handled properly" uhuh...

Not at you but in general. If someone cannot be bothered to throw plastic garbage in the garbage bin, such a person should not comment on ecology.

A poisoned frog from the toxic junk from a paper mill will be much better living near a "non-decomposing" PET bottle she will make a house in. But even better in a clean water without the PET bottle or the junk from paper mills.

Huge amounts of toxic waste are produced to make paper while basic plastics production is a pretty clean process. Actually, more oil is taken from the ground so you can make a cardboard packaging today than is extracted to make an equivalent PC package.


Sometimes I thin the people who proclaim paper bags "save planet" are those who think that cardboard and paper "gets delivered by a truck to a shop". No. It does not. The same milk does not grow in supermarket. This is the result of 1/2 the people studying social studies and physics, chemistry or biology being bad words in schools these days.


All that said, no packaging material is the best packaging material. Same as with the ladies.

Festool does a great job at this, sometimes to their detriment even.
/end rant

This is my personal experience on being on the backend of trash.
I own farmland/forest property two states away and one day received a letter from that state's EPA dept. concerning an illegal dump that I knew nothing about.  Basically, I was given a two month time period to clean it up, or they would clean it up for me and charge me either double or triple their cost. I forget, because by this time my brain had fogged over.  Since I own the land I am considered to have the deep pockets so I am liable.  The trash consisted of construction material, household trash, furniture, above ground pool, tires, and electronics.  Electronics are the biggest pain because of the heavy metals and I had to prove to the EPA that these were recycled as electronics (I paid Best Buy per item to take the electronics).  Tires (I had hundreds) is another pain and required me to have an EPA certified hauler to come to the site and pick up the tires and I paid per tire.  I could stage the tires in piles, but had to keep covered with tarps to prevent mosquitoes laying eggs in water collected in the tires.  (I had snow on the ground when I started and was done by April).  What I hated most is  plastic.  A plastic milk jug in a ditch will just completely fill full of dirt.  Plastic trash bags get tangled and buried and you fight each bag getting it untangled out of the dirt.  OSB after laying under 6" of snow is too heavy to even pick up.  Concrete is not a problem with the EPA and I left in place.  Drywall would absorb back into the ground, but for EPA reasons I cleaned it all up.  I had sixteen tons in a 40 yd roll off-had to pay a hefty surcharge because the limit was 5 tons. (the front of the truck came 2 feet off the ground loading the roll-off) I also probably recycled a ton of steel as there was a lot of automotive parts. I spent every weekend and all my vacation for the year driving over 300 miles away to clean up other people's trash.  This was the year of my 40th wedding anniversary and I had to tell the wife I had no vacation to take her anywhere.  It was not good.

I was able to met the EPA requirements and jumped through every hoop they threw at me.  But I hate people that dump their trash in the country.  So please just recycle your own stuff through proper cycles.  Cardboard breaks down, drywall breaks down, but take care of your own asphalt shingles and glass and furniture.  If you buy that overseas junk from Walmart, don't drive out in the country and dump it on someone else's property.  You would not want me to catch you.