What Is The Makeup Of The Blue Apron Cold Pack

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People love to complain almost the wastefulness of meal-kit delivery companies similar Blue Apron and Hello Fresh. The baggies that hold a unmarried scallion! The thousands of miles of aircraft! The endless paper-thin boxes! Those problems are annoying, but ultimately they're not environmental catastrophes: The baggies don't take up all that much landfill space, the cardboard boxes are recyclable, and it'south not clear whether shipping meal kits is less efficient than transporting food to grocery stores then to homes.

Bluish Apron has a take-back programme, but the company won't say whether it'southward actually reusing any of the freezer packs it'due south taking back—or simply storing them in a warehouse.

But at that place is a much better reason to criticize meal-kit companies—and as far equally I can tell, few people are talking much about it. That's surprising, because it's actually the biggest (or heaviest, at to the lowest degree) thing in every meal-kit box: the freezer packs that keep the perishables fresh while they're being shipped. Blueish Apron now sends out 8 million meals a month. If you figure that each box contains about three meals and two six-pound water ice packs, that'south a staggering 192,000 tons of freezer-pack waste material every year from Blue Frock lone. To put that in perspective, that'southward the weight of nearly 100,000 cars or 2 meg adult men. When I shared those numbers with Jack Macy, a senior coordinator for the San Francisco Department of the Environment's Commercial Nil Waste program, he could scarcely believe it. "That is an incredible waste," he said. The merely reason he suspects he hasn't heard most it nonetheless from the city's trash haulers is that the freezer packs stop up subconscious in garbage bags.

Given that many meal-kit companies claim to want to help the planet (past helping customers reduce food waste and buying products from environmentally responsible suppliers, for example), you'd remember they would have come up with a plan for getting rid of this always-growing glacier of freezer packs. Au contraire. Many blithely suggest that customers store old gel packs in their freezers for time to come utilise. Unless you lot happen to have your own meat locker, that'southward wildly impractical. I tried it, and in less than a month the packs—which are roughly the size of a photograph anthology—had crowded practically everything else out of my freezer. Two personal organizers that I talked to reported that several clients had asked for a consult on what to exercise with all their accumulated freezer packs.

As Nathanael Johnson at Grist points out, Bluish Apron has likewise suggested that customers donate used freezer packs to the Boy Scouts or other organizations. I asked my local Boy Scouts council whether they wanted my sometime repast-kit freezer packs. "What would we do with all those ice packs?" wondered the puzzled quango executive. (Which is saying a lot for an organization whose motto is "be prepared.")

The meal-kit companies' online guides to recycling packaging are non especially helpful. (Blue Apron'due south is visible only to its customers.) Virtually of them instruct customers to thaw the freezer packs, cut open the plastic exterior, which is recyclable in some places, and so dump the thawed goo into the garbage. (How-do-you-do Fresh suggests flushing the goo down the toilet, which, experts told me, is a terrible thought because it can crusade major clogs in your plumbing.) The problem with this advice is that information technology does not belong in a recycling guide—throwing 12 pounds of mystery goo into the garbage or toilet is not recycling.

To its credit, Blue Apron is the only major meal-kit service to offering a have-back program: Enterprising customers can mail freezer packs dorsum to the company free of charge. Only Blue Apron spokeswoman Allie Evarts refused to tell me how many of its customers actually practice this. When I asked what the visitor does with all those used freezer packs, Evarts just told me, "Nosotros retain them for time to come employ." So does that mean Blue Apron is actually reusing the packs in its meal kits, or is in that location an ever-growing mountain of them languishing in a big warehouse somewhere? Evarts wouldn't say.

Now back to that mystery goo, which, in instance you're curious, is whitish clear, with the consistency of absurdity. Its active ingredient is a substance called sodium polyacrylate, a pulverization that tin can absorb 300 times its weight in water. Information technology's used in all kinds of products, from detergent to fertilizer to surgical sponges. One of its nigh mutual uses is in disposable diapers—it'south what soaks upwardly the pee and keeps babies' butts dry. When saturated with water and frozen, sodium polyacrylate thaws much more than slowly than water—meaning information technology tin stay cold for days at a time.

The stuff within freezer packs is made from the same stuff equally fossil fuels, and it doesn't biodegrade.

Meal-kit companies assure their customers that the freezer-pack goo is nontoxic. That's truthful. But while sodium polyacrylate poses lilliputian to no danger to meal-kit customers, it's a different story for the people who manufacture the substance. (Meal-kit companies typically contract with freezer-pack manufacturers rather than making their ain.) In its powdered state, information technology tin get into workers' lungs, where it can crusade serious problems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted in 2011 that workers in a sodium polyacrylate plant in Bharat developed severe lung affliction afterwards inhaling the powder. Animal studies have shown that exposure to loftier concentrations of sodium polyacrylate tin can harm the lungs. Considering of these known risks, some European countries take ready limits on workers' exposure to sodium polyacrylate. Here in the United States, some industry groups and manufacturers recommend such limits as well as prophylactic precautions for workers like ventilation, respirators, and thick gloves. But on the federal level, neither the Occupational Safety and Health Administration nor the National Plant for Occupational Safe and Health have any rules at all. (The companies that supply freezer packs to Blue Frock and Hello Fresh did not return repeated requests for information on their manufacturing processes.)

Beyond the manufactory, sodium polyacrylate can also do a number on the environs. In part, that'southward because it's made from the same stuff as fossil fuels—meaning that making it produces significant greenhouse gas emissions, a squad of Swedish researchers found in 2015 (PDF). Information technology as well doesn't biodegrade, then those mountains of freezer packs sitting in the garbage aren't going anywhere someday soon.

So to review: Freezer packs create an epic mountain of garbage, and their goo is not as environmentally benign as meal-kit companies would have y'all believe. So what's to be done? One place to kickoff might be a greener freezer pack. That same team of Swedish researchers likewise developed a sodium polyacrylate alternative using biodegradable institute materials instead of fossil fuels. A simpler idea: Companies could operate like milkmen used to, dropping off the new stuff and picking up the old packaging—including freezer packs—for reuse in i cruel swoop.

A little artistic thinking might go a long style—yet none of the companies that I talked to said they had whatever specific plans to change the freezer-pack organisation (though Hullo Fresh did say it planned to reduce its freezer pack size from 6 pounds to five pounds). And when you think well-nigh information technology, why should they ready the problem? Heidi Sanborn, caput of the recycling advocacy grouping California Production Stewardship Council, points out that the electric current system suits the meal-kit providers simply fine. "It'south taxpayers that are paying for these old freezer packs to sit in the landfill forever," she says. "Companies are getting a full freebie."