The Cost of Over-Packaging

Dennis Salazar, president and co-founder of Salazar Packaging provides a number of reasons to the blog – sustainableisgood.com  why sustainable packaging can not only save the environment but money.

Here is a great description by Salazar how one package can be wasteful and costly.

“Here is what I see when I look at the packaging shown in the photograph:

.    Most obviously, the box is at least six times larger than necessary for the order and product it contained. Why aren’t they right sizing? End result – WASTE!

.    3” plastic tape to seal the top of the box – most of the world uses 2” tape. Why are they using 50% more tape than is normally necessary? End result – WASTE!

.    Standard corrugated box with probably 30 to 40% recycled content? Why aren’t they using a box with a higher or ideally100% recycled content? End result – WASTE!

.    Auto Lock bottom on box bottom sealed with tape. (now I am getting really packaging geeky on you) One of the features of an Auto Lock bottom box is that it does not require tape. Yet they feel it necessary to seal it with more 3” tape. There is something definitely wrong with this picture. End result – WASTE!

One air pillow for void fill – that single pillow does absolutely no good so you know, end result – WASTE!

What is the cost of NOT doing the little green things well?

It is very difficult to estimate without a complete analysis (which BTW I have offered to do for this company for free) but conservatively, I can guess their packaging cost is probably 20 to 30% higher than it really needs to be.”

Check out the entire post here.