Improving the Volumetric Efficiency and Sustainability of Amazon’s Ecommerce Packaging
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Ecommerce sales have rapidly expanded over the past decade, but the resulting inundation of packaging material poses major concerns about its environmental impact and unsustainable trajectory of waste production. Amazon, which hopes to achieve net zero carbon on all shipments by 2040, had a carbon footprint of 51.17 million metric tons in 2019. The largest carbon contributor was the fuel used to transport goods. In an effort to address its footprint, Amazon is working on material reduction and increased recyclability of its packaging. Yet, current sizes of prestocked cardboard boxes do not allow for configurability over small and non-flat products, and boxes are often oversized. At scale, the waste impact of this inefficiency is exacerbated. Furthermore, the commonly seen plastic bubble mailers used for small and flat products are not easily recyclable in typical curbside recycling streams. As such, the purpose of our project is to design a recyclable packaging solution that can be configured to optimal product volumes, where being both volumetrically and mass efficient in turn correlates to transportation efficiency. Our approach focuses on exploring the configurability of curbside recyclable materials and designing an efficient packaging process within the constraints of Amazon’s current fulfillment process. Our packaging solution incorporates Amazon’s paper padded material as a secondary packaging material and a laser-cut, corrugated cardboard as dunnage material for products prone to denting or damage. In accordance with Amazon’s standard packaging testing procedures for vendors, we developed and carried out test procedures to assess (1) the volumetric efficiency with a metric known as the Box Utilization Score (BUS) and (2) the robustness of our packaging solution. We also worked with Amazon to estimate the carbon impact of our solution, given our chosen materials and their respective masses. Comparing our solution with Amazon’s current packaging practices, we were able to increase volumetric efficiency (BUS) by 50.26% and reduce the carbon impact of the packaging by 18.36%. For more fragile products, the corrugated cardboard dunnage provides a promising, recyclable alternative to plastic cushioning, but further variations should be tested to reduce product damage. Our results suggest a possible future direction for Amazon’s packaging solutions, where reducing the bulk of cardboard packaging with dynamically configurable and size optimized mailers could reduce Amazon’s overall carbon footprint.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Nykolyn, Miranda |
|---|---|
| Author | Cong, Allison |
| Author | Meave, JC |
| Author | Flam, Rachael |
Subjects
| Subject | Carbon emissions |
|---|---|
| Subject | packaging |
| Subject | dynamically configurable |
| Subject | sustainability |
| Genre | Student project report |
Bibliographic information
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Nykolyn, Miranda; Cong, Allison; Meave, JC; Flam, Rachael. (2021). Improving the Volumetric Efficiency and Sustainability of Amazon’s Ecommerce Packaging. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/yz519bk4395
Collection
ME170 Mechanical Engineering Design
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- engreference@stanford.edu
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