What: the latest initiatives to reduce cardboard boxes use

Why it is important: a growing number of companies have ideas about how to reduce packaging waste

According to Pitney Bowes (a shipping services company), global parcel volumes topped 100 billion in 2019 for the first time and surged in 2020.

A growing number of start-ups and brands want to take the cardboard box out of the equation entirely. Here are the latest initiatives that are trying to wean consumers off single-use packaging.

• Olive (shopolive.com)

The company was founded by Nate Faust, who previously co-founded Jet.com in 2014 before it was sold to Walmart in 2016.

The platform launching 17 February 2021, will deliver orders from different brands (such as Adidas, Anthropologie, Everlane, Ray-Ban, Goop, Free People, Hugo Boss, Sam Edelman, Stuart Weitzman, ThirdLove, Veronica Beard, Ugg Australia and Vince) in soft and sturdy reusable crates. Customers can return them by leaving outside their front door for the postal service to collect. The totes arrive as weekly shipments (twice weekly in New York), allowing Olive to consolidate orders from multiple retailers at its warehouses.

Olive hasn’t actually eliminated cardboard boxes from its shipping process yet. When a customer places an order, the brand first ships the item to the start-up’s warehouses in the same packaging that would have gone to homes, and only then are products put into their totes. Faust said as volumes rise with individual retailers, in the next three or four months, it will become cost-effective for Olive to start shipping totes directly to brands, meeting the start-up’s goal of eliminating single-use packaging.

• Asket (Swedish menswear brand)

The brand spent a year redesigning nearly every aspect of its packaging, from the thickness of its cardboard to the size of its return instruction cards. It swapped out plastic garment bags for a greener alternative even though it would slow down garment handling in factories and warehouses.

• Repack (Finnish company)

The company offers customers a choice: receive their items in the usual disposable box, or pay a few dollars extra to swap in a mailer designed to be shipped back for a few dozen more trips through the post. The mailers are plastic, as are Olive’s, but their boosters say by using them again and again they save far more packaging from the landfill than they create.

• Boox

The brand of e-book readers is testing various incentives to convince recipients of its boxes to return them, including discounts on subsequent purchases and donations to local schools or charities.

• Amazon

The company has repeatedly tightened packaging rules for sellers on its marketplace to consolidate items in fewer, smaller boxes, and has even installed machines in some warehouses that create form-fitting packaging for items as they roll down the conveyor belt. Whether the goal was to reduce shipping costs, save the planet, or both, the end result, according to the company, was to use the equivalent of 1.5 billion fewer boxes since 2015.

Consumers have spent two decades stuffing the packaging from online orders in the trash. Convincing them to think about boxes, paper and plastic bags is a struggle and there’s a price to pay: so far additional costs or slower deliveries.

The Start-Ups That Want to Solve Fashion’s Packaging Problem _ BoF Professional, News & Analysis 

Olive, New E-commerce Platform, Consolidates Packages Into Weekly Delivery