Packaging

Sustainable Packaging Best Practices

Most packaging sustainability advice is about materials. The bigger win is usually size — and it's the one that also saves money.

Start with size, not material

Before choosing a greener material, use less of it. Oversized boxes are the dominant failure mode in e-commerce packaging, and they're expensive in four directions at once:

• More corrugate per shipment.
• More void fill to stop contents rattling around.
• Higher freight cost, because carriers bill on dimensional weight — air in a box is billed as though it were solid.
• Fewer parcels per vehicle, so more vehicles and more emissions per item delivered.

Right-sizing is the rare intervention where the environmental case and the cost case point the same way. Practical moves: keep a wider range of box sizes rather than defaulting to three, use mailers instead of boxes for non-fragile flat goods, and check cube utilisation — if a typical parcel is more than about a third air, there's money on the floor.

Materials, ranked by what actually happens to them

The useful question isn't "is this recyclable in principle" but "will this be recycled where the recipient lives."

Corrugated cardboard and paper — the safe default

Cardboard is accepted in essentially every curbside programme, has genuinely high recycling rates, and carries meaningful recycled content already. Paper-based void fill, paper tape and paper mailers keep the whole parcel in one material stream, which means the recipient can put the entire thing in one bin without disassembling anything.

Plastic film — recyclable, but rarely recycled

Poly mailers, bubble wrap and air pillows are technically recyclable but almost never accepted curbside. They require store drop-off programmes, and participation is low. Worse, film in a curbside stream tangles sorting machinery and contaminates other materials.

Film does have a real advantage: it's light, which cuts transport emissions. For a large, lightweight, non-fragile item the honest answer is genuinely contested. But if the recipient can't easily recycle it, count it as waste in your assessment.

Mixed and laminated materials — the worst outcome

Padded mailers that combine paper outers with plastic bubble linings are the classic trap. They look paper-based, get put in the paper bin, and contaminate it. Anything that can't be separated by hand in a few seconds will end up in the wrong stream. Mono-material beats clever composites almost every time.

Compostable and bio-based — read the fine print

"Compostable" usually means industrially compostable: sustained high temperatures that a garden heap doesn't reach. If the recipient lacks access to industrial composting — most people do — it goes to landfill, where it may perform no better than conventional plastic. It also contaminates plastic recycling if mistakenly sorted there.

"Bio-based" describes what a material is made from, not how it breaks down. Bio-based plastics can be chemically identical to fossil-derived ones and just as persistent. Treat the two words as unrelated.

Design rules worth following

• One material per parcel where possible, so disposal takes no thought.
• Say where things go. A one-line disposal instruction on the box measurably improves sorting.
• Cut ink coverage. Heavy printing complicates recycling and adds cost for no functional gain.
• Design for the return journey. Packaging that reseals lets customers reuse the original box, avoiding a second one entirely.
• Protect adequately. A damaged item means a replacement shipment and a return — vastly worse than slightly heavier packaging. Under-packing is not a sustainability strategy.
• Skip the theatre. Branded tissue, ribbon, inner sleeves and printed cards are pure waste in most categories.

The regulatory direction of travel

This area is moving quickly, and the direction is consistent: the cost of packaging waste is being shifted onto the companies that create it.

• Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). A growing number of US states, along with the EU, Canada and others, require producers to fund the collection and recycling of the packaging they put on the market. Fees are typically eco-modulated — cheaper for easily recycled mono-materials, more expensive for hard-to-process formats. Bad packaging is becoming a direct line item.
• Recyclability mandates. The EU has adopted a packaging regulation tightening recyclability requirements, setting reuse and recycled-content targets, and restricting some single-use formats — including rules aimed at excess empty space in e-commerce parcels.
• Recycled content requirements and plastic taxes in several jurisdictions penalise virgin plastic below a threshold of recycled content.
• Green claims rules. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have tightened enforcement on environmental marketing. Unqualified claims like "eco-friendly" or "green" are increasingly treated as misleading unless substantiated and specific.

If you sell physical goods across markets, packaging decisions made now will be assessed against these rules for years. Designing for recyclability early is cheaper than retrofitting under a fee schedule.

Where delivery choices matter more than packaging

Packaging is visible, so it absorbs most of the attention. But for many shipments the transport decisions dominate the footprint:

• Air freight is dramatically more carbon-intensive than ground. Offering — and defaulting to — a slower ground option does more than any material swap.
• Failed deliveries double the last mile. Lockers and pickup points cut both emissions and theft.
• Returns carry the full footprint of a second journey plus processing, and often end in disposal. Better sizing information and product photography reduce returns more effectively than any packaging change.
• Split shipments. Letting customers consolidate an order into one delivery beats four separate parcels.

For the person receiving the parcels

• Flatten cardboard — it improves sorting and transport efficiency.
• Tape and paper labels on cardboard are fine; you don't need to remove them.
• Keep plastic film out of curbside recycling. Collect it for a store drop-off point instead.
• Pull apart padded mailers: paper to paper, lining to waste.
• Keep sturdy boxes for returns — reuse beats recycling.
• Choose slower shipping and consolidated delivery when you're offered the option. It's the highest-impact click available to you.