Consumers wrestle with deluge of boxes from delivery services
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
MINNEAPOLIS — The digital age has unleashed a torrent of cardboard boxes bound for homes as shoppers have everything from diapers to dinner ingredients shipped to their doorsteps.
Boxes are piling up in basements and garages, filling apartment building mailrooms and spilling out of overstuffed recycling bins. And they just keep coming — sometimes several a day.
“It’s kind of amazing,” said Dale Wood, who tends to a recycling drop-off center in suburban Minneapolis and sees a steady flow of people stopping by on Saturdays with cardboard that doesn’t fit in their curbside bins. “A person that just lives in a normal house would come with a whole truckload of cardboard.”
Nationwide, the United States Postal Service’s package deliveries are up 65 percent since 2009. The onslaught of boxes is changing recycling and traffic patterns, inspiring thieves and even forcing changes in building design.
A 360-unit Churchill Apartments in downtown Minneapolis receives 100 to 200 packages a day, with deliveries showing up more sporadically as Amazon offers near-instantaneous shipments using hired carriers. About 30 to 50 parcels arrive daily at the 56-unit Elysian Apartments, packed with students, near the University of Minnesota.
“Amazon Prime is showing up 10 times a day at these buildings,” said Dan Oberpriller, whose company CPM Companies manages the Elysian.
That means new apartment buildings need parcel storage areas, recycling chutes and reconfigured mail rooms or high-tech electronic lockers, which send residents access codes to retrieve their packages, said architect Neil Reardon of UrbanWorks. The lockers take some strain off property managers, who are grappling with how to recoup the costs of the new service.
At single-family homes, some large curbside recycling bins just aren’t enough to keep up with the flow.
“That thing gets filled up fast,” said Tanner LePage, who has begun tossing boxes into the backyard until he can dispose of them.
Despite the influx of boxes heading to houses, box shipments nationally have remained relatively steady due to an accompanying drop-off in shipments to traditional retailers, said Rachel Kenyon, vice president of the Fibre Box Association, a trade group.
With boxes going directly to consumers, companies increasingly want their products to stand out from the pile, said Neal Mintz of Minneapolis box manufacturer Cedar Box Co.
A client who ships car seat covers, for example, recently asked for a blaze-orange box. Twenty years ago, a brown box would do just fine.
Some wonder about the environmental impact of the growing piles of boxes.
And what about traffic from all the deliveries?
The Minnesota Department of Transportation estimates that e-commerce will be responsible for about 5 to 10 percent more freight traffic between now and 2030, said spokesman Kevin Gutknecht.
But Twin Cities residents are also making fewer trips to the store than they did in 2001, based on travel behavior data. University of Minnesota professor David Levinson said that, coupled with the logistics efficiency of professional delivery services, likely means there are fewer trips overall.