Amazon has converted the automated machinery at its Ohio, US facility to produce 100% paper packaging. The highly automated Amazon fulfillment center in Euclid, Ohio is the first in the U.S. to replace plastic delivery packaging with paper packaging solutions that are curbside recyclable.
Like most retailers, Amazon has traditionally used a mix of plastic and paper packaging to optimize for durability, weight, and size. However, recycling plastic packaging generally requires customers to head to a drop-off location, therefore packaging engineers of Amazon have been researching and experimenting for years to ensure they find the right solutions to deliver products to customers with paper.
By rebuilding existing machines to use paper instead of plastic, creating durable and flexible paper packaging, improving made-to-fit technology, and transitioning from plastic air pillows to paper filler, the team enabled the Euclid fulfillment center to transition fully to paper packaging. This work is part of a multiyear effort to convert U.S. fulfillment centers to paper, and these new paper solutions will provide the convenience of allowing many customers to recycle at home.
“This is a major milestone for our U.S. fulfillment centers, and I’m incredibly proud of the teams that developed new technologies to eliminate plastic packaging,” explained Pat Lindner, VP of Mechatronics and Sustainable Packaging at Amazon. “This is just the beginning, as we continue to discover more ways to eliminate and reduce plastic packaging for our customers.”
Customers want orders delivered in correctly sized, easily recyclable packaging that ensures the product arrives undamaged and minimizes its impact on the environment. In the cases where an order does require additional packaging for product safety, Amazon has historically utilized plastic air pillows.
While it is a common practice in retail shipments, these kinds of pillows require extra work for customers to pop them and then drop them off at a local recycling facility. To address this, Amazon is shifting to paper filler made from 100% recycled content, allowing customers to conveniently recycle them in their curbside recycling bin.
Amazon also spent the past several years developing a new machine that creates on-demand, curbside-recyclable, made-to-fit packages for products that require more protection than a non-padded bag. This machine measures an order’s dimensions and then creates a right-sized, protective package using a type of corrugate that is flexible and lighter than the typical box.
This new technology has the largest custom-package size range of any other automated machine at Amazon, with the ability to create made-to-fit packaging for roughly half of Amazon’s packages shipped. The made-to-fit technology, paired with the lighter corrugate, enables these machines to reduce waste by minimizing the amount of material shipped per package, and additionally, provides the customer with an easy-to-open experience.
