Box cleverer: how to cut waste in ecommerce

A meme on social media show­ing a tear­ful woman with a cap­tion that reads “I get more Ama­zon box­es in a week than I can fit in my recy­cle bin” sums up the prob­lem with pack­ag­ing in 2021. 

The growth of ecom­merce since the start of the Covid cri­sis – online sales in the UK dur­ing the first quar­ter of this year were 54% high­er than the total for Q1 2020, accord­ing to research by Adobe – has height­ened con­cerns about pack­ag­ing waste. 

On the one hand, online shop­pers com­plain about exces­sive pack­ag­ing. On the oth­er, a pur­chase that arrives dam­aged, need­ing to be returned and replaced, will have a far big­ger envi­ron­men­tal impact. 

While con­sumers are becom­ing increas­ing­ly eco-con­scious and mind­ful of waste in pack­ag­ing, etail­ers must con­sid­er sev­er­al oth­er fac­tors, includ­ing cost, secu­ri­ty and acces­si­bil­i­ty (23% of online shop­pers in the US have dam­aged at least one pur­chase dur­ing the unbox­ing process, accord­ing to pack­ag­ing firm DS Smith).

In Decem­ber 2020, the Char­tered Insti­tute of Mar­ket­ing (CIM) warned that the growth in ecom­merce was the main rea­son why 85% of the UK con­sumers it polled thought that etail­ers were using too much pack­ag­ing. Ama­zon was sin­gled out as the worst offend­er by far, but oth­er big com­pa­nies attract­ing crit­i­cism includ­ed Asos and super­mar­kets Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda.

“We know the lock­downs have changed buy­ing behav­iour and there has been a con­sid­er­able increase in online pur­chas­ing, which means more home deliv­er­ies,” says the CIM’s mar­ket­ing direc­tor, Gem­ma But­ler. “Even where com­pa­nies have improved their pack­ag­ing, the increased vol­ume of pur­chas­es will nat­u­ral­ly push up the amount of pack­ag­ing in cir­cu­la­tion.”

Innovation needed: recycling is not enough

Stress­ing the need for inno­v­a­tive pack­ag­ing solu­tions, But­ler calls for an update of the pop­u­lar ‘reduce, reuse, recy­cle’ max­im. 

“Recy­cling can­not be seen as the answer,” she argues. “It should be con­sid­ered only after reduc­ing and reusing. Our recy­cling infra­struc­ture can­not sup­port the vol­ume and vari­ety of pack­ag­ing in cir­cu­la­tion, so most of the mate­r­i­al still ends up in land­fills. Organ­i­sa­tions must rethink not only the mate­ri­als they use in their pack­ag­ing, but also the life­cy­cle of that pack­ag­ing.”

A pan-Euro­pean sur­vey con­duct­ed by DS Smith in March sup­ports her view. Near­ly half (46%) of the con­sumers it polled said they want­ed to see more card­board or paper-based pack­ag­ing, rather than plas­tic, while 58% want­ed an over­all reduc­tion in the vol­ume of pack­ag­ing. Most notably, almost a third report­ed that they had stopped buy­ing cer­tain brands because they con­sid­ered that their pack­ag­ing was not suf­fi­cient­ly sus­tain­able.

Anoth­er find­ing – that 22% of UK respon­dents don’t always have room in their recy­cling bins for all the pack­ag­ing they receive – is one that’s “dis­turb­ing” to DS Smith’s sales, mar­ket­ing and inno­va­tion direc­tor, Marc Chi­ron. “Some box­es are being put to good use – peo­ple are reusing them for stor­age, for instance – but many aren’t find­ing their way back into recy­cling streams,” he reports.

Aware­ness about pack­ag­ing that’s “fit for the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my and ecom­merce age” is grow­ing steadi­ly, accord­ing to Chi­ron. “Com­pa­nies can con­tribute by choos­ing solu­tions that elim­i­nate waste and keep mate­ri­als in use. But this goes beyond mate­r­i­al choic­es, as sup­ply chains need to be opti­mised to avoid the unnec­es­sary use of trans­port too. That would be the win-win out­come for busi­ness and envi­ron­ment.”

Win-win: sustainable and branded packaging

Chi­ron adds that high-qual­i­ty brand­ing that explains an etailer’s approach to sus­tain­abil­i­ty in pack­ag­ing has become a key mar­ket­ing tool. 

“Sto­ry­telling is a grow­ing trend in the retail sec­tor. It can ele­vate on-pack­age brand­ing to the next lev­el,” he says. “Inno­v­a­tive busi­ness­es are using pack­ag­ing that con­veys their crafts­man­ship and pas­sion. This enables a com­pa­ny to con­nect with cus­tomers in new ways, elic­it­ing emo­tion­al respons­es and mak­ing it eas­i­er for them to iden­ti­fy with the busi­ness and its prod­ucts.”

Jonathan Dixon, senior vice-pres­i­dent of sales at Arla Foods UK, agrees that it is cru­cial for “brands to get their pack­ag­ing right”. He notes that ecom­merce sales in the gro­cery sec­tor are 70% high­er than they were at the start of the pan­dem­ic – and that con­sumers spend only 15 min­utes doing their week­ly gro­cery shop online on aver­age, com­pared with 43 min­utes in a super­mar­ket. 

“For new brands, pack­ag­ing is their main mar­ket­ing tool when sell­ing online,” Dixon says. “It must there­fore stand out to pre­vent shop­pers from scrolling past.”

Com­pa­nies that have cre­at­ed sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing solu­tions in recent times include Ital­ian pas­ta brand Bar­il­la. It adopt­ed 100% paper-based con­tain­ers in May 2020, tak­ing out the plas­tic front win­dows that had made the packs less easy for con­sumers to recy­cle. Its move fol­lowed that of rival brand Napoli­na, which in Sep­tem­ber 2019 had switched the pack­ag­ing of some lines from plas­tic to card­board. Napoli­na esti­mates that this change has tak­en 16 tonnes of plas­tic out of the waste stream each year in the UK alone. The com­pa­ny is has start­ed to extend plas­tic-free pack­ag­ing to its core range in a bid to push the total up to 200 tonnes.

Wilkin­son Sword recent­ly switched to plas­tic-free pack­ag­ing when it relaunched its Hydro shav­ing razor range. The change has removed 88 tonnes of PET and 35 tonnes of vir­gin paper from its sup­ply chain every year, achiev­ing a sig­nif­i­cant cost reduc­tion in the process.

Wayne Sny­der is vice-pres­i­dent of retail indus­try strat­e­gy for EMEA at Blue Yon­der, a US spe­cial­ist in sup­ply man­age­ment soft­ware. He believes that tech­nol­o­gy can help busi­ness­es strug­gling to strike a bal­ance between pack­ag­ing cost, secu­ri­ty, acces­si­bil­i­ty and sus­tain­abil­i­ty. 

“Retail­ers can­not look at any of these fac­tors in iso­la­tion,” Sny­der argues. “Each requires a dif­fer­ent weight based on its char­ac­ter­is­tics as well as the busi­ness strat­e­gy. While this task may seem daunt­ing, new AI tech­nolo­gies will enable an opti­mised method that fac­tors in these ques­tions to find the right bal­ance.”

It’s clear that con­sumer brands look­ing to thrive in the ecom­merce age must make sus­tain­abil­i­ty a pri­or­i­ty and think both inside and out­side the box when it comes to pack­ag­ing.