For some people, they are the secret highlight of an online order: air bags and bubble wrap, which are actually supposed to protect the goods but burst spectacularly when thrown away. But the soft packaging is becoming rare. In the USA, market leader Amazon has announced that it will no longer use plastic padding by the end of the year.
“As of today, this will be Amazon’s largest effort to reduce plastic and will save around 15 billion plastic pillows annually,” Amazon said. In Germany, Amazon has already done away with the bags and bubble envelopes since 2022, a company spokesperson said when asked. Instead, the shipper uses crumpled packing paper.
The reason for this measure is environmental protection. All major shippers have significantly reduced their packaging in recent years. Amazon is increasingly shipping goods without any additional packaging: the address label is simply placed on the existing packaging box.
The competition is keeping up: German competitor Otto is currently working on a biodegradable alternative to conventional plastic packaging. Customers have long since gotten used to the fact that fashion retailers such as Zalando and About You send their clothes in thin plastic bags, although this type of packaging for parcels was almost unknown before the era of online fashion. This saves cardboard packaging, weight – and above all volume.
The new food delivery services are also reducing packaging: Edeka partner Picnic, for example, delivers in plastic boxes, which the drivers take back with them straight away. Flink, a subsidiary of Rewe, uses conventional paper bags.
Overall, there are noticeable effects: “Since 2015, we have reduced the average packaging weight per shipment by more than 41 percent and avoided over two million tons of packaging material,” says Amazon, for example. The industry wants to use such calculations to allay customer concerns that mail order is less environmentally friendly than buying in a store. In any case, studies show that, thanks to the lack of physical stores and commuting customers, e-commerce is often superior to brick-and-mortar shopping overall.
Packaging is important for the ecological balance of mail order compared to retail stores. According to a study from the “Journal of Cleaner Production”, which is cited by the Federal Environment Agency (UBA), shipping packaging accounts for around a quarter of the specific environmental impact of online retail. That is around half of the environmental impact of the “last mile” delivery to the customer.
The range is wide. The UBA gives a range of 20 grams of CO₂ equivalents for a small folding box to one kilogram for a large carton. For comparison: a bag in the supermarket can therefore contain up to 130 grams.
Such initiatives are also necessary because the EU Packaging Regulation, adopted in the spring, aims to reduce packaging waste by 15 percent by 20240. Among other things, there are now upper limits on empty space in online retailers’ shipping boxes.
However, the originally planned requirement for a reusable quota for e-commerce packaging is no longer planned. Instead, the packaging should be recyclable – which it usually already is. In addition, it should be able to be partially reused, at least in theory.
Reusable alternatives to disposable packaging are therefore still barely gaining traction. Start-ups like Heycircle from Munich, which also appeared on the Vox show “Höhle der Löwen”, are working on recyclable boxes. But the effort involved is great: after all, the boxes also have to be sent back.
So far, Heycircle’s products have only been used in practice on a small scale – primarily for internal company processes. Clothing manufacturers Trigema and Drykorn, for example, use them to send goods from their warehouses to some of their own stores. Tchibo sends coffee machines internally for repair in the boxes of the young company, which is financed with two million euros in venture capital. The boxes rarely go to end customers – for example, to the blanket mail order company Voited.
“Larger companies start with internal logistics because they also have large amounts of waste there,” said Heycircle spokeswoman Andrea Ilsemann. She calculates that 94 percent of waste and 76 percent of CO₂ emissions can be saved with a large box, despite the return transport and production of the box in Asia. A box is ecologically beneficial if it is used ten times or more.
Disposable cartons are also a lucrative business: the total packaging market in the EU is estimated to be worth 370 billion euros. A real growth driver in recent years has been the booming mail order business. This is one of the reasons why a lobby battle over the EU’s packaging regulations has been raging for months.
The real lever for environmental protection lies elsewhere anyway: From the point of view of eco-experts, online shopping with its colorful websites and unlimited opening hours often leads to overconsumption. Unnecessarily purchased goods are always unecological – no matter what packaging they come in.
