Recycle or Compost Your Packing Peanuts

Packing peanuts are the small, light, foamy materials added to boxes to protect products during shipping.

Their success as a packaging material means recipients face disposal dilemmas. What do you do with them?

Because they consist of around ninety-nine percent air, their bulkiness in large quantities creates storage problems. Throwing them out means they end up in landfills.

Peanut manufacturers recognized this dilemma and now offer two additional disposal options, recycling or composting.

Recycling is the option of choice for peanuts made from polystyrene, a plastics polymer often called styrofoam.

The Plastic Loose Fill Council, created in 1991, maintains an on line data base consisting of over 1,500 places in the United States that accept packing peanuts for recycling.

Concerns about the environmental costs associated with the oil-based, non-degradable characteristics of polystyrene peanuts led to the development of biodegradable starch based peanuts. They keep products safe during shipping and easily dissolved in water without creating chemical residues.

You can put them on your compost pile for easy, earth-friendly, disposal. (Please note, if they do not dissolve in water, do not place them on your compost pile.)

There is no easy answer to the question of which type of packing peanut is better for the environment. The environmental production and shipping costs associated with starched based peanuts, make for difficult comparisons between the two products.

For example, it might be difficult to argue that the environmental costs associated with polystyrene peanuts, that are recycled and used on ten separate occasions, are greater than the environmental costs associated with the production and shipping of starch based peanuts that are disposed of after one use.

Consumer choice will eventually answer the question. Since biodegradable packing peanuts cost at least twice as much as their polystyrene counterparts, consumers will choose between biodegradable peanuts that add to up-front shipping costs and non-biodegradable peanuts that add a back-end transportation cost of a trip to the recycling center.

Until then, when you think packing peanuts, think recycle or compost.

© 2007. Patricia A. Michaels