Greening Austin Daily

Take Your Styrofoam Packing Peanuts to UPS, not FedEx

20th February, 2012 - Posted by katherine - No Comments

Have you ever received a large package annoyingly filled with packing peanuts?  I received four large boxes over the weekend filled with packing peanuts and found myself in this very situation.  I considered saving them for when I send cookies to my grandfathers, but I know those two aren’t going to search out where in upstate New York they can recycle all that, they would just throw them in the trash (you know how 90 year olds can be).  Plus I didn’t want to store the equivalent on one large trash bag of packing peanuts in my house.

I’ve written before about a drop off spot in Austin that takes styrofoam for recycling,  but that business (Cycled Plastics) now has its website under construction so I’m not sure if they are still accepting styrofoam.  So I took my backseat full of packing peanuts to UPS instead.  I checked with FedEx first, and they are no longer using packing peanuts at all to try and be greener, but UPS will still take them so long as they are clean.  So there you go, take them to UPS!