Amazon’s long journey away from its iconic brown boxes | Wilnesh News

Every year, the United States consumes enough cardboard boxes to line a mile-wide road from New York to Los Angeles three times, or to build a mile-high cardboard wall around the entire continental United States.

Of the primary targets to help reduce the mountain of packaging, perhaps the most notable are Amazon’s shipping boxes or envelopes. In 2022, 11% of Amazon orders globally were shipped in original manufacturer packaging. The company has not released specific numbers for 2023 for the plan, which aims to move away from Amazon’s signature brown boxes, known as “brown boxes.” Shipped in product packaging program.

It identifies products that might work, contacts the supplier, and then to make sure the package isn’t damaged during delivery, Amazon works with those companies to test the product in a lab. Packages need to be able to withstand falling off a conveyor belt, vibration and shaking on a truck, or a delivery person accidentally dropping a package while walking to the door.

“We qualify products ahead of time to ensure they can be delivered to customers without loss. We then simulate the e-commerce fulfillment process as part of the testing process so that when products are enrolled into the program, we ensure they meet the minimum requirements standards for safe arrival,” said Kayla Fenton, senior manager of packaging innovation at Amazon.

Testing varies depending on the product. Liquid items are trickier than stuffed animals. “Our testing is designed to respond to specific product types and their inherent vulnerabilities,” Fenton said. The test results are then fed into a machine learning model, which looks through the Amazon catalog to find more products that can be added to the program. If a supplier sells red T-shirts, for example, a blue T-shirt will likely perform just as well, Fenton said.

The product is tested five times, and every time something goes wrong, it helps the machine learning model evaluate what went wrong and how to fix it. Customer feedback is also entered into the system. Amazon can reuse the boxes if customers complain about damage and return more items as a result.

Go North Group, an Amazon-fulfilled aggregator that sells a variety of home and garden supplies, health, sports and pet products, is one of the companies asked to join Amazon’s ship-packing program. Go North supply chain director Johan Stellansson said tests showed 80% of the company’s products could be shipped without additional packaging, including its MalsiPree portable water bottle for dogs.

In some cases, an extra piece of tape is enough to add some extra stability to the box so it can make it through the shipping process intact, including some of the company’s pet stain and odor remover products, which come in bottles , and then packed in the box. Larger products that require a lot of filling were not included in the program, which Stransen said led the company to reconsider whether it should continue selling the product on Amazon. “We won’t develop new products unless we can ship them in a manufacturer’s box,” he said.

Amazon initially opened the program to suppliers and later to sellers. Suppliers are more like Amazon’s suppliers, while sellers operate more independently.

Fenton noted that as Amazon’s warehouse network grows and gets closer to customers in some areas, the delivery process becomes shorter, allowing the company to ship more items without packaging. Additionally, not all projects will enter the program. Some never will. For privacy reasons, personal items such as adult diapers or sexual health products will not be shipped without a box or postal parcel. In addition, Fenton emphasized that customers can choose whether to ship in the manufacturer’s packaging during checkout.

Not all items can be shipped without a box or mailer. To this end, Amazon has been working to reduce packaging, especially plastic packaging – using paper mailers instead of plastic bubble mailers and paper bags instead of plastic bubble bags.recently it Converted into a fulfillment center From plastic to 100% curbside recyclable paper just outside of Cleveland, Ohio. The center uses a machine to scan items and then create a box or envelope with precise dimensions, reducing the amount of air and using less packaging, which increases weight.

Automation and machine learning play an important role in minimizing packaging. “The more automation we have, the more control we have over the ‘right size.’ We can really package or package any size, dimension or product,” said Pat Lindner, vice president of mechatronics and sustainable packaging at Amazon. box, as long as we can use the camera to measure correctly. ” Ultimately, measures to reduce packaging have multiple benefits, saving money and reducing waste.

“We think it’s good for the environment. We think it’s good for customers because there’s less material to dispose of at home,” Lindner said.

Consumer habits remain difficult to change

Measures to reduce or eliminate additional packaging are only part of the solution. Another is reusable packaging. Amazon has experimented with reusable products in the past — mostly through Amazon Fresh grocery delivery — but found that too few customers returned the insulated tote bags.

Asking people to change their usual habits by returning packaging is an uphill battle. Even so, some companies are introducing reusable packaging, said Michael Newman, chief executive of Returnity Innovations, which supplies reusable boxes and bags to companies including Rent the Runway and clothing brand Vuori.

Newman said reusable products work best when people don’t have to change their habits. These include situations where people have returned items or purchased multiple sizes of the same item to try on at home. Reusable packaging also comes into play when goods are shipped to retail stores and employees are responsible for returning boxes.

“It doesn’t require consumers to change their behavior,” he said.

Packaging is designed to withstand an average number of reuses, which may range from 5 to 20 times, depending on the company. For reusable products to work from a carbon footprint perspective, customer return rates need to be 90 to 95 percent, Newman said. Reusable plastics generally use more resources, they are thicker plastics, so if they are thrown away or not reused regularly, the environmental impact can be worse than using single-use plastics.

Boox, which primarily provides reusable shipping boxes for luxury direct-to-home brands like Goop and Rhodes, has a lower return rate of 20% because the boxes must be returned in a separate step, CEO and co-founder Matt Semmelhack said. . Nonetheless, he is optimistic that through legislation, consumer habits will change. “There will be an inflection point, probably when Walmart or Amazon starts doing this,” he said.