The online shopping market has seen an incredible surge over the past years. It is becoming the common avenue for the average person to use to acquire the goods they seek. As such, there is a new demand for packaging that we’ve not seen before. Think about it. The biggest eCommerce retailer in the world started off by selling just books, which required little packaging. Today, that company sells a multitude of goods, all of which need various types of product packaging.
With the great distances that packages need to travel from the makers to the consumers, some products get damaged along the way. It’s happened to all of us, hasn’t it? In order to bring an end to that kind of customer disappointment, packaging manufacturers like https://www.boxcoop.com/ need to innovate and create better packaging. Here’s how the rise of online shopping influences the packaging industry and how it affects shoppers.
The Concern Over Double-Packaging
When ordering online, you expect to get your products in their original packages. What that means is that all of your shipments need to be double-packaged. Each package needs to be wrapped in a protective secondary packaging to ensure that it is not damaged in transit.
The overwhelming majority of the secondary packaging is made of corrugated cardboard. However, it is often combined with bubble wrap or packing peanuts for extra safety. That leaves the problem of recycling and reusing this secondary packaging.
Recycling the Secondary Packaging
The vast majority of secondary packaging is not recycled. Seeing how this is a relatively new trend, we have not yet developed efficient and detailed plans how to approach this problem. Even the consumers who order a lot of things online don’t see this double-packaging methodology as problematic, at least not yet.
This is both a problem and an opportunity. Whereas there is undoubtedly a lot of waste of potentially recyclable materials, if someone manages to solve this problem, they would stand to become hugely successful in the packaging business.
How to Approach this Problem?
Just like with regular product packaging, secondary packaging will probably have to change to reflect the new, green lifestyle that most people are adopting. It will not only be beneficial to the planet and our limited resources, but also for the companies which use these packaging methods. The good press which comes with the use of green technologies is a great motivator for businesses.
There are a few methods which are currently being tested by various entities which should tell us how viable they are as a way to reduce the waste of resources. The first is using only natural and environmentally friendly materials like cardboard and paperboard to ensure the high recyclability potential. Using previously recycled materials is even better because it minimizes both the cost and the waste of resources.
Closed-loop logistics management ensures that the company which delivered the goods can recover the secondary packaging, which enables them to reuse it quickly and effectively, without creating additional waste at the consumer end.
Some plans are taking a different approach. There are companies which experiment with the shape of the packaging in order to minimize the amount of material needed to successfully protect the product from damage. Needless to say, the less material you use to protect your product, the lower the cost of the packaging, transport, and finally, the overall cost of online shopping in general.
Even though there are some problems with the secondary packaging, experts are hard at work to solve them. But for the time being, secondary packaging is the most viable option when it comes to protecting products shipped to shoppers around the world.
Online shopping has taken over the entire world. It is very convenient to shop from online stores across the globe sitting in the comfort of your living room. Packaging plays a important part in delivering the required goods to its locations.