wasteful packaging

Kara Hurst is the director of Worldwide Sustainability and Social Responsibility at Amazon and she spoke at GreenBiz this year. The topic: wasteful packaging and Amazon's initiatives to cut it out. There are so many reasons to be sustainable and this video highlights some of them. Most notably, I think, is the idea that companies can save money by cutting out unnecessarily unsustainable practices.

Product packaging is costs companies $1.6-3 trillion dollars a year. Amazon took 55,000 tons of packaging out of the system in 2016 alone, along with saving 546,000 trees because of their reduced packaging initiatives! 

I found it interesting that they are still remaining very customer focused; while reducing packaging helps reduce waste it is also helping customers have better experiences. Kara uses the phrase "wrap rage" to describe the feeling of unwrapping your product from overly exuberant packaging. Customers find little value in packaging when buying from an online retailer and so companies in this industry are doing away with it.

I particularly liked Amazon's shipping with no containers initiative, where if your product already comes in a box they do not put it in another box for shipping. In 2016 they eliminated 165 million overboxes, which were an unnecessary expense for them, a hassle for customers, and a drain on environmental resources.

What Amazon is doing is awesome but I can't wait until it becomes common place. One day people will wonder why something that comes in a box already would ever be put in another box just to ship it. Sustainability just makes sense.