Every Box Counts: Reimagining Shipping Boxes for a Circular Economy
It takes over a billion trees to produce 67 million tons of paper. But it took only one year — 2018 — for the United States to generate 67 million tons of paper and paperboard waste (equivalent to the weight of 1000 Titanics). Every time I trash a packaging cardboard box that my online orders are shipped in, I wonder why companies like Amazon don’t reuse their shipping boxes?
According to the United States Postal Services (USPS) reused boxes are acceptable provided all previous stickers and labels are removed or completely blotted out. But removing the stickers is a lot of work and may damage the box. Also, the box sometimes gets damaged when we remove the packing tapes that secure the box.
In this blog post I write about some design ideas for reusing cardboard delivery boxes and how that reuse might affect costs and environmental savings. I use Amazon as an example to speculate about cost and environmental savings because it is the e-commerce market leader in the United States.
Redesign for reuse of cardboard boxes:
Purely from a design perspective, the packaging tape and labels seem to be the two major obstacles to reusing the boxes (assuming the boxes are not damaged during shipping).
- Design of the labels: Amazon boxes come with labels glued to the box. It is difficult to remove the label without damaging the box. Design idea: each box is given a transparent jacket as shown in the image below. A label printed on regular card paper can be inserted into the pocket. A customer can return the box for reuse by just flipping the label.
- A flex sleeve instead of packaging tape: A flex sleeve made out of recycled plastic or natural rubber along with end caps can be used to close a box instead of packaging tapes. The sleeve is as easy and efficient to use as a packaging tape to close the box.The sleeve, the end caps, and the box all can be reused. A small sticker can be put on the end caps to show that the box remains untampered. With this arrangement, waste created by the self adhesive tapes, the label, and its backing paper can be avoided.
Now you may think that this could make sense from a design perspective, but what about cost implications and the logistics of shipping the boxes and the sleeves back to Amazon?
Economics for reusing cardboard boxes:
(Detailed calculations are at the end of this post). Mathematically, Amazon could save USD 250 million every year by reusing their cardboard shipping boxes just once i.e. by using each box twice. This increases to about USD 400 million if the boxes are reused four times i.e. each box is used a total of five times. It is not just about cost, but reusing the boxes once (or four times) could also save about 3.6 million (or 5.6 million) trees!
However, this is just a purely mathematical calculation. Let us assume that the actual savings might be just 25% of the pure mathematical calculations. Even in that case, reusing the boxes once (or four times) would mean a cost saving of USD 62.5 million (orUSD 100 million) along with saving over a million trees. These are conservative numbers as only Prime members are considered and the average number of orders are from 2018.
If all of this still makes sense, here is another out of the (cardboard) box idea: What if Amazon starts shipping items with fold flat boxes made from recycled plastic? These boxes could be used over 100 times, will not need any self adhesive tapes, and just a couple of stickers to indicate that the boxes are untampered. This could not only save trees but would repurpose plastic waste into something useful.
The logistics of returning the boxes to Amazon:
Every new design / system needs a pilot run to check its viability. Some counties in the San Francisco Bay Area have invited Amazon to run a pilot in their area. If the company delivers 60% of its packages through its own delivery trucks, then reusing shipping boxes is worth a try!
Calculations
- 24 trees (40 ft tall) make 1 ton paper, therefore 67 million tons of paper will need around 1.6 billion trees
- Number of boxes used by Amazon in 2020
Number of Amazon Prime members in 2019 in United States : 112 million
Average number of orders by a Prime member per year in 2018: 24
Assuming each prime member received one box per month, total boxes used by Amazon in 2020 = 112 million *12 = 1.34 billion boxes. For making the calculations easy we consider 1 billion boxes.
3. Number of trees for 1 billion boxes:
Approximate weight of a 12’’ x 10’’x 8’’ box = 0.3 Kg
Weight of 1 billion boxes (of the above size) = 300 thousand tons
Number of trees for 1 billion boxes = 300,000*24 = 7.2 million trees
