Reducing Waste This Holiday Season

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of Invok's Sustainability Watch series. Here, we share relevant news and insights on some pressing issues facing the CPG industry. We hope these articles will help spark conversations among your team and inspire you to consider how we as an industry can be part of the long-term solutions to our planet’s environmental problems. 

Shopping, SIPPing, Reducing, and Reusing  

‘Tis the season for gift-giving and excess waste! Americans, for example, produce 25% more trash between Thanksgiving and New Year’s (this includes everything from food waste to wrapping paper and product packaging). With Black Friday just past us and the holiday season in full swing, brands are looking for new ways to help consumers reduce their environmental impact.

One major player in the conversation around packaging and holiday shopping is Amazon. Just this year, the e-commerce giant saw “record-breaking” sales during the period around Black Friday, claiming it as their “biggest ever” holiday shopping event. This year, the company is hoping to reduce the amount of packaging that they are shipping out with their Ships in Product Packaging (SIPP) Program.

Leveraging machine learning to help manage and identify the proper packaging for anything from a t-shirt to a canoe, Amazon estimates that 13% of their deliveries this season will be shipped in their original container, without any added Amazon packaging. While that may not seem like a huge number, since 2015 this and other packaging reduction programs have helped Amazon avoid over 2 million tons of packaging and reduce the average packaging weight per shipment by more than 41%. In using the latest technology and proactively looking for ways to reduce packaging and increase its recyclability, Amazon is helping us all be a little more eco-friendly this holiday season.

Learn more here: PackagingDive

Paper, Plastic and Reusable Bags

It is worth noting, though, that the true solution to reducing packaging waste is to prevent or reuse it. According to the Environmental Paper Network, our forests can’t keep up with the amount of single-use paper packaging that is being used today. “Three billion trees are already cut down every year for paper packaging alone,” they state on their website.

The Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) is one company that has taken notice, as they have recently done away with giving out paper bags at their stores, 15 years after getting rid of plastic bags. The LCBO is encouraging shoppers to now bring in reusable bags, saying that the move away from paper bags will save the equivalent of 188,000 trees each year and divert some 2,665 tonnes of waste from landfills.

For brands looking to create some awareness and advocacy, there is a simple yet effective opportunity with reusable bags that our client Hayter’s Farm has been taking advantage of. Taste & Tradition this holiday season is something everyone can agree on – Happy Holidays and Happy Recycling!

Learn more here: Environmental Paper Network