[karatestomp]

It's a bit like the "is trying to reduce food waste a useful endeavor?" discussion on here a few days ago—we waste a bunch of shit because it's so cheap it's not worth saving. If you put in extra effort to save it, probably that costs more than just buying what you wanted on the market, by the time you're done. If enough people do that and demand rises prices will go up a little and waste will drop a little, too.

So really if you want to effectively cut e.g. plastic use or increase its re-use you have to make it expensive, but that's kinda contrary to the whole point of using plastic in the first place.

Similarly, as industry's really gotten good at minimizing use of materials as a cost-saving measure (I assume CAD or something has enabled this? It's very noticeable since especially the late 90s) it's made re-use harder. I've seen those good, thick old department store plastic bags live for decades as a container for occasionally-accessed stuff in storage, and plastic bottles used to be so tough you could use them for all kinds of things that modern ones would be very bad at. Old plastic storage bins may have used a lot more plastic and been more expensive but they didn't crack if you looked at them funny like the modern ones. Stuff like that. So we got "reduce" in a way, but it just made stuff even cheaper so we use more of it, and made "re-use" much less practical.

[namibj]

For storage bins/boxes, I can recommended getting a couple KLT (Kleinladungsträger). It's an industry norm from the German automobile parts manufacturers, who use it for highly automated parts handling. They're ~8$ each for the large 60x40x28cm kind, have a reinforced (grid-structure) floor and they are strong. They easily stack to >100kg (not per-box though, which is rated at iirc ~35kg (edit: 20kg)), and have a slot for a DIN-A5 sheet on one long and one short side. They're ~2.8kg injection-moulded polypropylene, and thus survive quite aggressive chemical cleaning and boiling water. You're not supposed to fill them, but I'd guess you could do it anyways (e.g., filling with warm/hot water for soaking) if otherwise unloaded and resting on flat surface. It would contain ~60l, and thus almost twice the design load, but these are robust. I climb on them in storage, and the major risk is bending a wall outwards and then breaking it by inducing that bending load with the weight on my foot.

TL;DR: buy industrial boxes. Proper German KLT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_container are really nice. I recommend R-KLT in blue (they don't look as bland as the grey ones).

[karatestomp]

Googled them, and those look like the old-school consumer ones (or a little tougher, even).

You know what? I wish Amazon had really durable boxes, like these but maybe even a bit sturdier, that you could add to an order, used as the shipping container for the rest of the stuff you ordered but also intended for re-use after arrival.

[namibj]

There are reusable shipping boxes made from similar materials. Those don't work as well with a robot, however.

I do still plan to get a lifting arm/manually-operated crane. It would be nice to not have to lift them with my spine, and these are made for reliably grabbing by a robot. Both from the sides and even from the top (when tightly packed).

(There are 4 access holes on the top that go down next to the grips on the short sides. A grabber uses one hook each to lock the box when unloading e.g. a pallet.)

You should be able to order from a company like Auer Packaging or a local alternative. Thankfully these are specified precisely, so manufacturers can't cheat on stability to save materials.

They actually recycle well, btw. When broken/used-up, they'll get shredded and turned back into new boxes. It works because they're pure PP and only one of a few fixed colors.