Amazon box strategy to fighting climate change and saving your recycling bin

The way Amazon deliveries arrive is changing with the online retail giant saying it will make parcels lighter and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

An Amazon delivery arriving in its original packaging, rather than a separate box.

Amazon is ditching boxes for more of its deliveries after more than half of its Australian customers said they don’t want additional packing in an effort to be more environmentally friendly.

In what is bad news for box makers like Anthony Pratt’s Visy and ASX-listed Orora, more Amazon deliveries — such as toilet paper, pet food and gardening equipment — will come in their original packaging.

Amazon says this will make shipments lighter, cut carbon emissions and eliminate the need to store and recycle cardboard boxes.

About 52 per cent of Amazon’s Australian customers said they would be happy to receive a delivery in its original packaging, rather than a separate Amazon box.

Amazon Australia country manager Janet Menzies said in the past eight years, the e-commerce behemoth has cut the weight of packaging by 41 per cent, removing more than two million tonnes of cardboard, paper and plastic globally.

The standard Amazon packaging.

It has been working closely with manufacturers — such as Windex maker SC Johnson — to strengthen original packaging so deliveries arrive undamaged rather than rely on separate Amazon boxes.

“Like us, our customers really care about reducing packaging, and we’ve made significant progress doing so for years,” Ms Menzies said.

“One way we do this is by working with manufacturers to design packaging that’s capable of shipping safely, without additional paper bags, envelopes or boxes from us. We’ve already achieved a lot, shipping more than triple the number of orders to customers with no added delivery packaging in Australia since 2021. We are working to ship even more deliveries the same way.”

Since 2021, Amazon has more than tripled the number of orders sent to Australian customers without added delivery packaging.

It comes as Orora’s net profit in the year to June 30 sagged 1.2 per cent to $184.8m, with chief executive Brian Lowe citing “challenging market conditions”.

“In North America, further margin accretion through account profitability programs and a continued focus on cost management is expected to be largely offset by ongoing volume softness,” he said.

Amazon has about 50 types of boxes for the 200 million items it stocks in Australia. This often creates some confusion among customers, given a single bottle of hand cream might arrive in a package big enough for three or four.

But, oddly, Amazon Asia Pacific operations director Akhil Saxena said the standard box sizes were designed to reduce waste, not add to it. “You cannot have all the kinds, all the sizes of the boxes that are there, right? But you use machine learning to say what’s the most optimal size of the box.”

But Ms Menzies said: “Ultimately, the most sustainable form of packaging is no packaging at all.”

Customers can opt in if they want no additional packaging and the item they ordered past safety tests.

But some still want discretion around their online orders.

Its research reveals that “condoms, haemorrhoid cream and bikini wax strips are among the items that customers would be least happy to receive without added delivery packaging” — each belonging to product categories Amazon already ships discreetly — as well as some high value items, which are excluded from Amazon’s reduced packaging program.

Amazon has strict customer privacy rules, with warehouse staff packing items using only barcodes — revealing no customer details — with that process added later in the fulfilment process.

But Ms Menzies said 58 per cent of Australian shoppers trust their neighbours to take care of their deliveries if they are not there to receive them.

Originally published as Amazon box strategy to fighting climate change and saving your recycling bin