Amazon packages are prepared for delivery at Amazon’s robotic fulfillment center on December 19, 2023 in Sutton Coldfield, England.
Nathan Stirk | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Every year, the United States transports enough cardboard boxes to pave a mile-wide road between New York and Los Angeles three times, or to build a mile-high cardboard wall around the entire continental United States.
Among the main targets to help reduce this mountain of packaging, perhaps the most notable is the Amazon shipping box or envelope. In 2022, 11% of Amazon orders worldwide were sent in the manufacturer’s original packaging. The company has not yet released the 2023 figure for the initiative to get rid of Amazon’s iconic brown box, called the Ships in Product Packaging program.
It identifies products that might work, contacts suppliers, and then, to ensure packages won’t be damaged during delivery, Amazon works with those companies to test the products in a lab. Packages need to be able to survive being dropped off a conveyor belt, vibrating and shaking from the truck, or the delivery person accidentally dropping the package on the way to the door.
“We qualify the products in advance to ensure that they will be delivered to customers without damage. Then we simulate the e-commerce fulfillment process as part of this testing process so that when the products are listed program, we make sure they meet that minimum standard to arrive safely,” said Kayla Fenton, senior director of packaging innovation at Amazon.
Testing varies depending on the product. Liquid objects are more delicate than a stuffed animal. “Our tests are designed to respond to a particular type of product and its inherent fragility,” Fenton said. The test results are then fed into machine learning models that search the Amazon catalog to find more items that can be added to the program. For example, if a seller is selling a red T-shirt, there’s a good chance the blue T-shirt will perform just as well, Fenton said.
Products are tested five times, and each time something breaks, it helps machine learning models evaluate what went wrong and how to fix it. Customer feedback is also integrated into the system. If customers complain about damage and return more items because of it, Amazon may start using boxes again.
Go North Group, a Fulfilled by Amazon aggregator that sells a wide range of home and garden items, as well as health, sports and pet products, was among those invited to join the program. Amazon packaging. Johan Stellansson, Go North’s supply chain director, said testing found 80% of the company’s products can be shipped without additional packaging, including its MalsiPree portable water bottle for dogs.
In some cases, an extra piece of tape was enough to add extra stability to the box so it could get through the shipping process without damage, including some of the pet stain and odor repellent products from the company, which are delivered in bottles which are then packaged in boxes. Larger products that require a lot of padding were not included in the program and Stellansson said that caused the company to reconsider whether it should continue selling the product on Amazon. “We won’t develop a new product unless we can ship it in the manufacturer’s boxes,” he said.
Many efforts to reduce packaging are underway, but one simple strategy that Amazon is using more to reduce packaging use is to use boxes directly from companies like Clorox, McDonalds, and Starbucks, without additional Amazon cardboard .
Amazon
Amazon initially opened the program to sellers and has since opened it up to sellers. Sellers are more like Amazon suppliers, while sellers operate more independently.
Fenton noted that as Amazon’s warehouse network has grown and gotten closer to customers in some regions, the delivery process is shorter, allowing the company to still ship no more items without packaging. Additionally, not all items are included in the program. Some never will. Personal items, such as adult diapers or sexual wellness products, will not be shipped without boxes or mailing envelopes for privacy reasons. Fenton also pointed out that customers can choose at checkout whether or not to ship in the manufacturer’s packaging.
Not all items can be shipped without a box or mail. To achieve this, Amazon has worked to reduce packaging, particularly plastic, by replacing plastic bubble mailers with paper envelopes and plastic bubble mailers with paper. It recently converted a distribution center outside of Cleveland, Ohio, from plastic to 100% curbside recyclable paper. The center uses a machine that scans items and then creates a box or envelope that is precisely the right size, reducing the amount of air and using less packaging, which adds weight.
Automation and machine learning play a role in reducing packaging. “The more we can automate, the more control we have over “right sizing.” We can really wrap or package in any size, dimension or product, as long as we can measure it correctly with the cameras,” said Pat Lindner, vice president of mechatronics and sustainable packaging at Amazon. Ultimately, the decision to reduce packaging has multiple benefits, saving money and reducing waste.
“We think it’s good for the environment. We think it’s good for customers because it’s less material to deal with at home,” Lindner said.
Consumption habits remain difficult to change
The decision to reduce or eliminate additional packaging is only part of the solution. Another example is reusable packaging. Amazon has experimented with reusable products in the past – primarily through Amazon Fresh grocery deliveries – but found that too few customers were returning the insulated bins.
Asking people to change their usual habits of returning packaging is an uphill battle. Even so, some companies are introducing reusable packaging, said Michael Newman, CEO of Returnity Innovations, which supplies reusable boxes and bags to companies such as Rent the Runway and clothing brand Vuori.
Returnity Innovations supplies reusable boxes and bags to companies such as Rent the Runway and clothing brand Vuori, based on the theory that reusable products work best when people don’t need to change their habits.
Return innovations
Newman said reusable products work best when people don’t need to change their habits. These circumstances include when people are already returning an item or when they purchase multiple sizes of the same item to try at home. Reusable packaging can also work when goods are shipped to a retail store and employees are responsible for returning the boxes.
“This does not require a change in consumer behavior,” he said.
The packaging is designed to withstand the average number of reuse, which can vary from five to 20 times depending on the company. Newman said that for reusable products to work from a carbon footprint perspective, customer return rates need to be 90 to 95 percent. Reusable products generally use more resources, they are thicker plastic, so if they are thrown away or not reused often enough, the environmental impact can be worse than using single-use plastic.
Matt Semmelhack, CEO and co-founder of Boox, supplies reusable shipping boxes to largely luxury direct-to-home brands like Goop and Rhode, but because the boxes must be returned in a separate step, the return rate is lower, at 20%. He nevertheless remains optimistic that with the legislation, consumer habits will change. “There’s going to be an inflection point, and that’s probably going to be when Walmart or Amazon start doing this,” he said.
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