Recycle Those Shipping Materials

I'm sure that many of you, like me, abhor polystyrene packing peanuts. They take up space, pollute the environment, and the stupid static cling makes them stick to everything, especially your hands. I was especially annoyed when I realized that HSN uses these peanuts in their shipping. For a company that processes thousands of shipments per day to women (and maybe a couple men) around the country, you'd think they would be a little bit better about their environmental impact and perhaps switch to using biodegradeable cornstarch peanuts. I started thinking about other mail-order companies and, of course, Amazon.com came to mind. I'm a huge fan of Amazon and my packages always contain those little plastic airbags. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Amazon has a page dedicated to recycling their packaging materials. Those little plastic bags are actually recycleable. Who knew? They probably say "reycleable" right on them and I never noticed. They also mention that they use 100% recycled polystyrene peanuts, but they only use peanuts in 1% of their orders. For those instances, they give suggestions for how to recycle or reuse those peanuts. Nice! Meanwhile, I've written a letter to HSN to see if I can talk to someone about their packing material. The least they could do is to inform their customers as Amazon has done. We'll see if I can make any progress with this.