How to solve for the box-inside-a-box issue

It’s a sight practically synonymous with online shopping: the brown cardboard box with the Amazon smile logo on the side. Maybe there are a few dozen arriving at your apartment building every day, or maybe you haul a flattened pile to the end of your driveway once a week. It’s hard to imagine a world in which they aren’t ubiquitous. But Amazon’s own employees are working to create one in which you receive far fewer of them.

As a new mom, Kayla Fenton orders a lot of diapers. These days, they arrive on her doorstep in a single box, stamped with the manufacturer’s branding but shipped by Amazon. Diapers aren’t exactly fragile products, but it’s not unusual for them to arrive wrapped in an extra layer of cardboard and plastic padding.

“As you can imagine, I’ve got enough to deal with,” Fenton said. “I don’t need another box to break down.”

Fortunately, as senior manager of technology products with Amazon’s Packaging Innovation team, she’s in a position to do something about it. She and her colleagues are focused on finding more efficient ways to get the billions of products Amazon ships each year to customers. That starts with packaging — whether the solution is reducing it or, as in the case of the diapers, avoiding the additional box entirely.

“At a macro level, we’re really trying to get rid of customers receiving the box-in-the-box or the bag-in-the-bag when they shop online,” Fenton said. That means answering the question: What’s the least amount of packaging the company can use and still ensure a product arrives safely?

Amazon’s Ships In Product Packaging (SIPP) is part of a variety of initiatives aimed at addressing this issue on a massive scale. It’s also one of many innovations helping Amazon achieve the goals of The Climate Pledge, which Amazon co-founded five years ago to incentivize companies to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. (More than 500 companies have signed on since.)

Through the SIPP program, certain items shipped by Amazon may be shipped in their original manufacturer’s packaging without any supplemental boxes, bags, or packing materials added by Amazon. The option is only available for products that meet specific suitability standards (a bulk order of dog food, yes; a single chef’s knife, no) but through the efforts of Fenton’s colleagues, that share is expanding by the day. The team determines which items qualify for SIPP by putting packages through a variety of performance-based tests, including drop-testing boxes and evaluating the seal strength for flexible mailer bags. These experiments, conducted in Amazon’s labs and fulfillment centers, or directly at selling partner sites, are designed to ensure that packages hold up throughout the shipping journey and arrive safely at customers’ homes. Products that shoppers may not want visible during delivery — such as adult products — aren’t eligible for the program and will ship in discreet packaging.

Already, the company has reduced the per-shipment packaging weight by 43 percent on average since 2015, avoiding more than 3 million metric tons of packaging materials. Cutting down on cardboard and plastic is beneficial not only for the materials avoidance, but also for downstream effects on the amount of space products take up in delivery vehicles.

After all, the smaller the parcels, the fewer trips, in aggregate, it takes to bring them to customers’ homes. “If you can fit more packages on a last-mile delivery truck, then instead of needing two for a neighborhood, you may need one instead,” Fenton explained.

Over 21 billion parcels were delivered in the U.S. in 2022 according to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index, and with e-commerce playing an ever-greater role in people’s lives, reducing the waste of each shipment is an increasingly pressing consideration. SIPP is the rare win-win program where what’s better for the customer is also better for Amazon, its selling partners, and the environment. Customers who receive SIPP products opt-in spend less time breaking down boxes and peeling off tape. Manufacturers have the chance to build brand recognition, further sustainability initiatives, and save on seller fees.

Maximizing these benefits is a team effort. Fenton’s colleagues work directly with sellers to not only identify items for which the existing packaging meets the criteria to ship as-is but also to help develop and implement better packaging solutions. Take trigger bottles, which usually ship with lots of added materials so they don’t spill or leak in transit — a challenge for companies like Windex manufacturer SC Johnson that are trying to cut down on their packaging footprints. To tackle this, Windex and Amazon teamed up to design a streamlined box with a paper component that kept the bottle secure and wrapped it with thoughtful branding.

“They’re able to advertise the sustainability attributes of the product itself from a plastic-reduction perspective, while also reducing the likelihood that product’s going to damage in transit,” Fenton said. The project went from idea to implementation in under six months, she said — speedy for such a large brand — demonstrating the potential for significant large-scale change.

Packaging for products tends to be designed with the brick-and mortar shopping experience in mind — packages are deliberately sized up to stand out on a shelf, with hang tags conveying the same information as online product pages. In an ideal world, these extraneous features could be re-invented for online shoppers.

As Fenton puts it, “The best possible outcome is that the product and the packaging are designed for e-commerce in a way that’s a net end-to-end reduction in the amount of materials needed.”

This doesn’t mean that every product will arrive without a box: Amazon sells everything from smartphones to shampoo to floor lamps, and if something needs protection, packaging serves that purpose. Reducing damage during transit isn’t just about consumer satisfaction — it’s also a sustainability issue. If a set of wine glasses arrives cracked, it’ll likely end up in the recycling bin (if not the trash) and the company will have to send a replacement item, doubling the environmental impact of a single order.

For these items, the focus shifts to finding more sustainable materials to get them where they need to go safely, which is where updates like Amazon’s paper filler — a recyclable alternative to plastic air pillows — comes in. In less than a year, Amazon has replaced 95 percent of the plastic air pillows in its delivery packaging in North America with paper filler made from 100 percent recycled content. This effort will avoid nearly 15 billion plastic air pillows annually. The company’s materials scientists and packaging engineers are always testing new materials, and design adjustments with the aim of minimizing waste.

These days, they also have a crucial partner in determining the most efficient packaging for items that need to be shipped: the Package Decision Engine, a collection of business rules and machine learning models trained on millions of examples of previous products and shipments, including those that cracked, leaked, or otherwise got damaged in transit. This model learns from these opportunities to help Amazon proactively determine the best right-sized packaging for its constantly growing global catalog of products.

While her team is still constantly gathering data through physical testing — stacking boxes on vibration tables that simulate the movement in the back of an 18-wheeler truck or the belly of an airplane, squeezing them with clamps that replicate the force of a forklift, and putting them through incline tests that mimic the impact of sliding onto a metal truck bed — AI can apply these learnings, as well as those gained through real-life shipments, to Amazon’s near-infinite worldwide catalog.

At every step, success is measured not only by how well Amazon can implement these innovations but also by how seamlessly they can be adopted by other companies. Amazon’s size and influence mean that any advances or changes it makes ripple like corrugated cardboard through the industry.

“It’s not just about Amazon meeting our goals to be net-zero carbon,” Fenton said. “It’s about developing solutions that can help many retailers and also customers know how they can be a part of reaching net-zero carbon emissions as well.”