Less is more.
Amazon’s Box-on-Demand ensures tailor-made packaging sizes.
Thomas Reiner | 06.12.2019
The rapid growth of e-commerce is causing packaging consumption to skyrocket. Particularly annoying: In the often badly or not at all adapted shipping packaging there is a lot of air and empty space next to the product. This not only leads to an unnecessarily high consumption of packaging material, but also to excessive transport volumes – with the corresponding negative consequences for the eco-balance, climate and efficiency.
Amazon is now addressing the problem at 55 of its US warehouses with a box-on-demand solution. Machines are used to adapt the shipping carton exactly to the products to be shipped. The result: less material consumption and lower transport volumes.
The machines used pack 600-700 cartons per hour and thus exceed the performance of human workers by a factor of four to five.
The fight against overpacking with the Box-on-Demand solution is a long overdue step. Even if the recyclability of the packaging is a compelling necessity, it is still necessary to start beforehand. Packaging materials that are not needed in the first place do not even have to be recycled in the end. Less is clearly more. And Amazon is taking a consistent step in the right direction.
