Amazon has announced a major change to its packaging service across all of Europe, including the UK.
The online retailer giant has confirmed that all of its delivery packaging across the continent, including boxes, bags, and envelopes, will now be 100 per cent recyclable. The company added that the changes will also be applied to third-party sellers that use Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA), a service that allows sellers to store their products in Amazon's warehouses.
Amazon said it will achieve this goal by using flexible paper bags, cardboard envelopes, and corrugated cardboard boxes which it claims are easily recyclable. The company has also increased the number of products shipped without any additional Amazon packaging by more than 50 per cent throughout Europe.
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Pat Lindner, VP of Mechatronics and Sustainable Packaging at Amazon, said: " We’re excited that our European fulfilment network is now using recyclable packaging for customer orders. This is part of our long-term work to be a leader in sustainability, and we’ll continue to invest in innovative technology, machine learning, and more sustainable materials to ensure packaging—whether used by us or other companies—is good for our customers, communities, and the planet.”
The company said it is also working with its business partners to increase the amount of products to be delivered in original packaging made from cardboard and paper that is recyclable to customers. It highlighted that where packaging is required for a product, it will try and use lighter, appropriately sized packaging to help reduce waste and carbon.
Amazon claims that it uses a 'science-based' approach for all deliveries that require packaging by using machine learning to aid in determining which smaller products are suitable for packaging such as paper bags which are supposedly 90 per cent lighter than boxes of a similar size.
The company further claimed that this approach has led to a reduction of cardboard box use by over 35 per cent in the last five years. According to the company's latest sustainability report, two million tons of packaging materials have been avoided since 2015 while there has been a 41 per cent overall reduction in pre-shipment packaging weight since 2015.
