Day: February 10, 2021

Amazon has been making a mint during the pandemic. That business has resulted in multi-billion dollar pay days for the company’s soon-to-be former CEO, and millions of the company’s iconic cardboard boxes being left on doorsteps, and in lobbies and mailboxes every day. And when those piles of boxes climb higher, the cost they carry continues to climb, too.

That’s according to a new Bloomberg report detailing how the price of old corrugated cardboard—OCC in recycling industry lingo for the salvageable material that can be pulled from one of these Amazon boxes—has doubled over the past year. And that number doesn’t seem to be going down anytime soon: Another recent report from the industry trade publication Resource Recycling found that the national average price for OCC has scooted up to about $75 dollars per ton as of last month. For reference, that price was closer to $25 dollars per ton at this time last year.

Understanding this massive spike means understanding some basic tenets of economics: When the demand for, say, cardboard boxes spikes as rapidly as it did during the start of the covid-19 pandemic, it puts pressure on packaging manufacturers to put out more product, and fast. The thing is, that surge in demand wasn’t met with a similar surge in supply. Resource Recycling reported last year that during the initial height of the pandemic in the U.S.—around late March through April—recovered paper collection plummeted between 30% and 50%.

In other words, the production end of this supply chain now needed to do way more with way less recycled cardboard, leading to a price hike that will continue to skyrocket until recovery and recycle rates catch up with this newfound demand.

Even before the pandemic, the U.S. recycling system was an absolute mess. Until the mid-2010s, the U.S. sent most of its recycling over to China. But Chinese bans on plastic and sullied cardboard in 2018 sent recycling exports from the U.S. plummeting by more than 90% compared to the previous year. That’s led recycling programs to either divert loads of mixed paper and plastic to other Asian countries or send them to landfills and incinerators. While the box demand boom could actually help recycling programs looking to offload bales of cardboard, though Americans are going to have to figure out how to properly recycle to reduce contamination from things like diapers, used needles, and other horrors that have turned up in recycling loads.

Amazon certainly isn’t the only player contributing to the slow pileup of unrecovered boxes, but they’re arguably the biggest. In 2020, sales on the company’s platform totaled roughly $296 billion dollars—close to a third of all e-commerce sales online for the year, and far beating out retail competitors like Target, Walmart. In other words, one out of three boxes that were delivered onto people’s doorsteps during the pandemic were Amazon-branded.

Hyundai revealed its new crewless TIGER X-1 concept Tuesday. This unmanned utility vehicle (UMV) is the lynchpin of Hyundai’s experimental T.ransforming I.ntelligent G.round E.xcursion R.obot platform, which is designed to tackle harsh terrain on Earth (or off it), giving operators remote access to environments that would otherwise be too hostile for exploration. 

The TIGER X-1 concept is intended to be a compact, unmanned expedition vehicle operated remotely (or, potentially in the future, by AI) and capable of tackling obstacles that most traditional wheeled vehicles would not necessarily be equipped to overcome. For all intents and purposes resembling a moon lander at first glance, the X-1 can also “walk” with its wheels locked in place and its articulating legs extended, drastically increasing its ground clearance and maneuverability. 

Hyundai describes the TIGER system as a “mobility” platform, but we’re not entirely certain that’s the best way to describe it, considering its scale. While we suppose one (in this case, Hyundai) could argue that the TIGER X-1 might someday help to enable a degree of mobility in remote spaces (whether by helping to provide logistical support or other secondary functions), we’re not quite on board yet. 

To further compound the issue, this is essentially a scaled-down version of Hyundai’s own ELEVATE platform, which employed the same basic go-anywhere concept but on a scale intended for accommodating passengers, crew and larger cargo. The TIGER X-1, by contrast, is only a little larger than a typical carry-on suitcase. 

Both projects bear the fingerprints of Hyundai’s John Suh, vice president and head of Hyundai’s New Horizons Studio, headquartered in Mountain View, California. The studio, established last year, is in charge of developing UMVs, drawing on research and innovation leadership from Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs, including Hyundai’s own CRADLE (Center for Robotic-Augmented Design in Living Experiences), which developed the ELEVATE concept. 

“Vehicles like TIGER, and the technologies underpinning it, give us an opportunity to push our imaginations,” said Suh, in Hyundai’s announcement. “We are constantly looking at ways to rethink vehicle design and development and re-define the future of transportation and mobility.”

A system like TIGER could have numerous applications, from simple delivery duties, to scouting, to equipment maintenance in remote locations — even those on other celestial bodies. That the concept depicted here looks a lot like a lunar buggy is certainly no accident. 

Hyundai is pretty much open to exploring any use case that potential customers might envision, from business logistics to academic/non-governmental research support to yes, even military applications. “There’s always that possibility,” said Suh, who pointed out that there are plenty of applications for small-scale robotics that have nothing to do with combat. 

For now, TIGER is still a bit of an exploratory project rather than a guaranteed future product, and the full scope of any production platform’s capabilities will likely be defined by Hyundai’s customers, which, at the time of publication, don’t yet exist. The carrier drone shown is not within the current scope of the project, but something with which it is intended to be compatible. 

Hyundai will continue to work on studying both the feasibility and demand sides of the TIGER equation, and Suh welcomes input from the company’s new acquisition: Boston Dynamics. Hey, if all we get out of this is a bunch of dancing robots that transform into miniature cars, that’s still a win, right?

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