Say No to excess packaging!

As an environmentally conscious person who runs an e-commerce brand, I really struggle with packaging. All our smaller Items are sent in compostable bags, but our bigger bags are plastic. I try and reuse them as much as possible. But I can’t box it. This is why.

I was talking to another freight company last week, as always trying to get better freight prices and he said to me – “It would be cheaper if you boxed it.” My reply was, “Do you realise this is why we are losing our forest? They are being logged to make wood chips, to make boxes. I did go on more than this one sentence, poor guy… but his reply was – “But they can be recycled.”

Now. Pause on this.

When you think of boxes. Does the word recycled come to mind?

We are so programmed to think recycled when we think of boxes and paper bags, but this doesn’t mean they are made from recycled cardboard. Start looking at boxes; they sometimes have the recycled sign on them, but rarely do you see ones made from recycled material. Which means they are made from new material, i.e., woodchips, from forests and I’m afraid not just from plantations.

Logging our native forests around the world has become an epidemic, scarring our earth like a growing cancer. Causing habitat loss and mass extinction, and to remind you of the obvious, aren't our forests the lungs of the earth?  What is the tipping point when we can't breathe anymore?

78% of our native forests are being woodchipped. We are selling our native forest for paper products, including cardboard.

This has been driven by the e-commerce industry.  How many parcels do you get in boxes? Aren’t so many of them overkill for the product it is? How many of them could be sent in a compostable bag?

Yes, cardboard is 100% compostable and recyclable, but at what cost? The biodiversity of a forest is being lost for boxes. I know I am simplifying it, but if the freight guy is a reflection of society, most people have no idea.

To give you another visual, those paper bags that people are now using in supermarkets for their shopping. One 15-year-old tree only makes 700 bags.

This does not justify my use of plastic bags, I wish for a better solution, but next time you get a parcel in a box, think about this ....