> Not the least resource consuming - the least costly to amazon.
I suspect that cost is a much better approximation of resource consumption than what feels wasteful, especially because it forces you to factor human time as a resource, which many environmental activists like to treat as infinite and free.
I would absolutely agree with you, IF externalities were priced into the cost. Things like environmental damage are not part of the cost of something, so amazon does not factor it into their decision.
If we had things like carbon taxes on goods, then amazon's decision would likely be much more optimal for the environment.
Imagine the cost, in both time and work, to create all of the iron ore, coal and all the other natural resources that go into a single piece of crap sold on amazon.
If that were priced into the crap, I'm sure having some humans spend a few of their hours on repurpuosing it would make financial sense.
No, what's priced in is the cost of digging something up. Not the cost of creating it in the first place.
Also not priced in is the environmental cost of discarding the assembled product.
Edit: I might add that in the cost of digging up resources, in many cases the lives of the people doing the digging are not valued much more than the hours of the people doing the sorting of returned items. So that's something to think about as well.
