As E-commerce Booms, How Can the Packaging Industry's Green Transformation Be Driven?

With the rapid development of e-commerce and the logistics industry, express packaging used to protect goods has also grown and formed an industry of a certain scale. How is the boom brought by e-commerce driving new packaging trends?

More online shopping means more shipments.

In recent years, higher e-commerce sales and greater channel complexity have prompted brands to revamp their containers. According to a 2022 L.E.K. survey, among the brand and packaging managers who said they had e-commerce sales, 86% said they had changed the packaging of products sold online. The company sought feedback from 421 individuals who oversee brands sold in the United States, and found that the biggest motivation for the reported changes was adapting to automated handling, with 39% of respondents saying they had done so.

Moss said this choice is related to the greater likelihood that products sold online will use automated systems to pull items from shelves in fulfillment centers. The second-biggest reason for changing packaging was the need to better protect individual items, with 38% of respondents agreeing. Unlike the pallet safety and uniform cubes of retail stores, e-commerce orders are more likely to be pushed all the way to the buyer's home. Jeff Cloetingh, a managing director and partner at L.E.K., said that avoiding waste associated with damaged or leaking products, or leaving buyers dissatisfied with a brand, are some of the biggest motivations behind damage-prevention packaging.

This protection requirement has also made ships-in-own-container (SIOC) solutions more popular. With the right design, a single packaging choice can withstand the chaos of shipping and still be attractive enough for product use. For example, children's toys and electronics such as televisions may arrive in exactly the packaging of their destination, and shoppers open the packaging to install the gadget.

In unpublished results, L.E.K.'s Cloetingh said the survey found that more than 20% of respondents redesigned containers, thereby eliminating three layers of packaging. Another 2020 PMMI survey found that 40% of respondents had at least explored a switch to SIOC.

How brands choose to sell products online has also influenced packaging trends in recent years. If manufacturers sell through third parties such as Amazon, they may follow guidelines provided by the retailer, such as "frustration-free packaging." Jo

nghun (Jay) Park, director and associate professor of the Sustainable Packaging Research Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University, said these guidelines emphasize avoiding the ties, clamshells and packaging added by the shipping giant.

Direct-to-consumer shipping is also becoming more popular. A 2018 PMMI survey of brand manufacturers found that 28% of brand manufacturers had some form of direct-to-consumer sales. By the time of the 2020 survey, 66% of brands said they had already adopted that sales format. In these cases, brands are interested in lightweight and efficient packaging, whether plastic envelopes or corrugated cartons, that can reduce shipping costs and fit their contents precisely.

What kind of branding appears on packaging is also changing with online retail. If a company has direct-to-consumer shipping, then any secondary packaging becomes a new opportunity for labels, ink design or a custom look. At the same time, Izquierdo said, the items in packaging may lose more elaborate features - such as the clear window in cardboard packaging, which is usually needed to entice in-person shoppers to put the item in their cart. Labels accounted for 37% of L.E.K. survey respondents, who said they would make changes if they had recently made changes to their e-commerce packaging.

Packaging shifts toward sustainability

The recent packaging adjustments have come alongside more sustainable packaging plans, which often predate the pandemic. Nearly 47% of L.E.K. survey respondents said they had changed packaging in the past two years to use more sustainable materials. Potential exceptions may include cold-chain packaging for high-value products such as seafood or steak. But those who set 2025 sustainability goals had completed only 30% of those plans, and a higher share said they had a "significant gap" in their ability to achieve the goals.

Driving more online sales means retailers are keen to avoid damaging goods. Beyond cost, this outcome also leads to excess emissions when products are manufactured, packaged and shipped only to go straight into the trash or be sent back through reverse logistics. "In cases where we see market participants tactically choosing not to go the sustainable packaging route, it is often intentional and largely well justified, particularly in this e-commerce space," Moss said.

Park said that wanting to avoid product waste in online sales while achieving sustainability goals may not always be intuitive. For example, bulk food purchases surged early in the pandemic and remain popular as shoppers grapple with inflation. But oversized packaging can lead to food waste, sometimes making smaller portion sizes a more sustainable design.

In all cases, and especially where design choices aimed at sustainability or emissions reduction are less obvious, sources said brands still have room to improve in how they communicate those choices to customers. Traditionally, information was shared through packaging design or symbols, such as the logo of the International Forest Stewardship Council, but QR codes or other smart packaging systems may become part of how brands share design choices or intended disposal methods in the future.

Green and healthy development is becoming the norm

Express packaging not only has the function of well protecting mailed goods, but also has a certain function of corporate culture promotion. It can make the brand effect of e-commerce enterprises more prominent, increase consumers' awareness of the brand, and enhance the brand recognition of e-commerce enterprises. Express packaging can also be regarded as a mobile billboard. Therefore, express packaging designers should also strengthen brand design efforts. On the basis of meeting the needs of circular economy development, they should do a good job in express packaging brand design and use materials with better recyclability to make express packaging, truly achieving multiple cycles of reuse of express packaging.

Limited by the cost control of logistics companies and online merchants, plastic bags, tape and the like are mostly plastic products that are difficult to degrade. At the same time, garbage such as express packaging filler can be seen everywhere, and a large amount of express packaging material is difficult to recycle and reuse, which also makes the express packaging industry urgently need to transform toward green packaging.

The "green" development of express packaging has a large impact on the operating costs of e-commerce merchants and logistics enterprises, and consumers are also weak in their awareness of packaging recycling and sorting. In view of this, government policies should be the driving force, with e-commerce and express delivery enterprises as the main body and the whole industry chain working together, to promote the use of degradable materials in express packaging and the development of models for multiple recycling and reuse of express packaging.

Among them, whichever downstream manufacturer can launch green and environmentally friendly products with a certain cost advantage can seize the market opportunity first.

The express logistics application materials industry is an upstream supplier to express logistics enterprises, providing various express logistics application materials, mainly including electronic waybills/express waybills, woven bags, plastic bags, envelopes, packaging boxes (corrugated cartons) and tape, etc.

The rapid development of the express logistics industry has led to substantial growth in the market size of the express logistics application materials industry. It is expected that in the coming years the industry's supply capacity for green products will grow rapidly, and the short- to medium-term supply-demand balance in the industry will remain sufficiently flexible.

——This article is reprinted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-379408.html