Startups try to tame online shopping packaging boom
The pandemic set off a surge in online shopping — and with it, an avalanche of cardboard boxes and home deliveries. Now a crop of startups is focused on making ecommerce more sustainable by reimagining the disposable box, delivery conventions and mailing schedules.
One such service, Olive, being rolled out by Jet.com cofounder Nathan Faust, is partnering with more than 100 major retailers — including Anthropologie, Paige, Ray-Ban and Ugg — to consolidate home deliveries in reusable tote bags that are dropped off oncea week.
Other newcomers, meanwhile, offer reusable plastic mailing boxes, compostable packaging and algae-ink shipping labels.
The efforts are part of a larger shift within the retail industry to eliminate singleuse cardboard and plastic as consumers increasingly weigh the environmental impacts of fast and easy shipping. Brands such as Clorox, Haagen Dazs and Seventh Generation are moving toward glass, aluminum and stainless steel packaging that can be returned, cleaned and refilled for subsequent uses, with the help of Loop, a program introduced two years ago at the World Economic Forum.
Sustainability experts say much of the pollution associated with online shopping occurs during “last mile” delivery: that final stretch from warehouse to doorstep. But they say packaging is perhaps aneasier — and more tangible —problem to solve.
Consumers’ increased reliance on online shopping during the pandemic also put a spotlight on discarded cardboard piling up in recycling bins across the country. Corrugated box shipments rose 9% early in the pandemic as Americans stocked up on household paper, cleaning supplies and food, and they have remained elevated in the months since, according to industry data.
“There are trade-offs to shopping online and in stores,” said Scott Matthews, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has been studying the environmental effects of retail practices since the early 2000s.
“But packaging will always be a problem that needs to be addressed.”
Taking out the trash
Mr. Faust got the idea for Olive while he was taking out the trash one night.
“After 30 minutes of breaking down boxes and multiple trips down the driveway, it dawned on me that this is crazy,” said Mr. Faust, 41, who co-founded Jet.com and five years ago sold it to Walmart for $3.3 billion. “Twenty-five years into online shopping, and this is what status quo delivery looks like.”
He came up with a blueprint for a company that would not only reduce the amount of waste being shipped to customers’ homes but also streamline deliveries so that orders from multiple retailers are dropped off in a batch, instead of piecemeal. More than 100 apparel retailers — including Anthropologie, Finish Line, Ralph Lauren and Saks Fifth Avenue — have signed on for the service, which is backed by more than $10million in venture capital.
“The real power comes in the last mile to the consumer’s doorstep, where so much of the emissions in the post-purchase supply chain come from, largely because it’s an average of one box per stop on the delivery route,” Mr. Faust said.
Shoppers buy items as they normally would, using the company’s app or a Google Chrome plugin. When it’s time to check out, Olive has the order routed to one of its two warehouses, in Southern California or northern New Jersey.
From there, workers unpack individual orders, recycle packing materials and place items in a reusable bag that is delivered once a week.
The service’s benefits, Mr. Faust says, are twofold: It ensures more packaging materials are recycled properly while eliminating multiple delivery trips throughout the week.
Toreturn an item, the shopper places it back in the shipping tote for the U.S. Postal Service to pick up. The service is free for consumers; Olive makes money by taking a roughly 10% share of each retail order.
Mr. Faust says consumers are willing to wait a few extra days for their orders if it means dealing with less waste, though analysts say that could be a difficult proposition given that services such as Amazon Prime have conditioned shoppers to expect just about anything to arrive within a day or two.
To that end, Mr. Faust says he is focused on apparel orders, which tend to be fragmented because consumers buy from a range of sites, all with their own delivery timetables and conventions.
“With apparel, there aren’t preconceived notions of when should some things how up like there is when you shop on Amazon,” he said, adding that the company plans to eventually expand into other categories, such as cosmetics, and add more advanced tracking and delivery information.
The more efficient online shopping becomes, the better environmental option it becomes to in-store shopping, said Mr. Matthews of Carnegie Mellon.
Delivery trucks can make more concentrated deliveries instead of boomeranging around town, he said, resulting in lower greenhouse gas emissions. Plus, a delivery truck that makes dozens of stops an hour is more efficient than individual shoppers driving to several stores for a handful of items at a time, he said.
Retailers have also become more careful about packaging and box size, which has helped curtail waste. Amazon, which accounts for nearly 40% of the country’s online sales, said it has reduced packaging by 33% since 2015, eliminating more than 900,000 tons of packaging material, equivalent to 1.6 billion shipping boxes.
The Boox option
When the pandemic hit last year, high-end shoe company Charix moved all of its business online. Sales boomed sixfold — but so did returns and exchanges.
“We quickly realized ecommerce is very different from traditional retail,” said Suley Ozbey, who founded the Washington-based company in 2015. “We’d get shoes back in boxes that we couldn’t use again, and it was piling up.”
He began looking for alternatives and found Boox, which offers brightly colored reusable plastic mailing boxes with a Velcro-like fastener and don’t require packing tape. Mr. Ozbey pays about $2 per Boox, versus about 75 cents for a cardboard box, but said the investment has been worthwhile. Each plastic container can be used up to a dozen times before it’s recycled.
Boox, started six months ago by restaurateur-turnedentrepreneur Matthew Semmelhack, sells its reusable plastic mailing boxes to more than 30 specialty retailers, including Ren Skincare, Boyish Jeans and Curio Spice Co. It is nearing 50,000 shipments a month, with half of those boxes being returned by consumers.
“The folding cardboard box was invented 120 years ago and hasn’t changed much since then,” said Mr. Semmelhack, 38, of Petaluma, Calif. “But the way we receive packages and products has changed wildly over the last 10 or20 years.”
Each box can be reused about a dozen times, he said. Once returned, they’re quarantined for a week, cleaned using organic soap and water, and redeployed for more deliveries.