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Ask HN: Is anyone recycling food service cold packs?

1 points by imglorp ↗ HN
Meal kit (Hello Fresh, Blue Apron, etc) packaging is mostly recyclable but the cold packs are generating more than 200,000 tons of landfill waste a year.[1] Those packs seem to contain sodium polyacrylate, which is mostly nontoxic but has a number of better uses than landfill, from flocculant to diapers to chelation.[2]

Is anyone thinking of a business to capture and repurpose some of this material?

1. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/06/meal-kit-freezer-packs-blue-apron-hello-fresh/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_polyacrylate

2 comments

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cinntaile
Over here, in an EU country, Hello Fresh uses ice packs. You can water the plants with it afterwards. Lobbying might make more sense than starting a company, it might be why it's not used here. Not that this is an answer to your question though.
imglorp
Good point, eliminating the root cause. I think sodium polyacrylate is used because it lasts 3x longer.