Can an Innovation Lab Put an End to the ‘Box in a Box’? amazon thinks so

Inside an Amazon facility in Sumner, Washington, a package falls 17 times.

Nearby, other packages sit under the weight of 30,000 pounds or are squeezed together between two clamps, hopefully avoiding any folding under pressure.

These wasted packages aren’t going to the customer’s door and aren’t going through Amazon’s normal network of warehouses. Instead, they are lab rats.

In Amazon’s Packaging Innovation Lab — a 10,000-square-foot facility in a complex of Amazon buildings in Sumner — packages are put through the ringer. The lab has a machine to simulate the bumpiness of the rear of a semitrailer, as well as one that mimics those trailers sliding into the walls if the driver applies the brakes. It has extremely cold chambers, and is extremely humid. And it tests every side of the box, following a specific 17-drop protocol.

The lab aims to cover the entire delivery process from “pack-to-porch,” said Justin Mahler, Amazon’s director of packaging innovation. It’s part of a testing protocol Amazon has set up to improve its packaging, which aims to reduce the amount of plastic, cardboard or other materials it uses to ship. The ultimate goal, Mahler said, is to get rid of packaging altogether.

The Packaging Innovation Lab is one of Amazon’s efforts to reduce a significant amount of pollution. On the road, it hopes to head towards electric delivery vans. In its data centers and corporate buildings, it plans to switch to renewable energy. In its warehouses, it seeks to minimize the amount of packaging used for each shipment, while ensuring that each product arrives on time and not damaged.

Amazon says it is making progress but environmental groups, workers and stakeholders are increasingly calling on the company to do more.

“Being one of the biggest retailers, they have one of the biggest opportunities to make a change,” said Pam Clough, an attorney with Environmental Washington. “And right now, they’re not moving.”

Nearly 2,000 corporate employees pledged to participate in a walkout in May to demand Amazon do more to address its impact on the climate. Activists have also gathered outside the company’s Seattle headquarters to ask Amazon to reduce emissions. Nearly 30% of investors voted in favor of a resolution at the company’s annual shareholder meeting last month that would require Amazon to set a goal to reduce its use of plastics.

Patrick Lindner, vice president of packaging and innovation, said Amazon says it is taking cues from its customers, who are encouraging the company to move away from single-use packaging, excessive packaging and waste.

“They continue to bring insight to us,” he said. “The cool thing about working here is that we have a solution.”

package in the wild

Lindner said Amazon began focusing on packaging about 10 years ago, but that effort has really accelerated as orders skyrocketed with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lindner said Amazon had mastered the other two important parts of shipping — arriving on time and without damage. So it can turn its attention to eliminating waste. “If we’re not doing them (the first two) well and we’re not meeting customer expectations, then we don’t really get a chance to drive the sustainability piece,” he said.

Amazon first opened its Packaging Innovation Lab in 2009 in one of its first corporate buildings on Rainier Avenue in Seattle. In 2022, it plans to move the lab about 30 miles south to Sumter, where it houses an experimental fulfillment center and partly an operations center. The innovation lab goes by the name BFIX, following the same naming scheme Amazon uses for its other Washington fulfillment centers, such as BFI3 in Dupont and BFI4 in Kent.

The lab has about 20 employees, some with engineering backgrounds and others who work in Amazon warehouses, where they observed what was working and what wasn’t.

Throughout its network of fulfillment centers, Amazon now has buttons for employees to provide feedback on packaging as they move items in and out of the warehouse.

The Innovation Lab conducts around 100 tests a week. The company said it trains labs around the world to conduct their own tests, and then reviews thousands of those results every week.

For comparison, Amazon says it delivers more than 10 million customer packages globally every day.

From the lab, Amazon sends information to manufacturers, suppliers and sellers, as well as analyzing some of it itself. Those data points can then help make decisions about the best way to package an item – balancing the desire to minimize packaging while ensuring the product is delivered on time and in good condition.

“We know that our packaging goes into the wild,” Mahler said.

innovation spillover

Environmental groups, researchers and Amazon itself say that reducing packaging is so important for Amazon because people buy so much in its marketplaces. According to data and statistics company Statista, Amazon has a 37% share of the e-commerce market in the United States.

“Amazon primes people to overconsume,” said Deepak Rajagopal, an associate professor at UCLA’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability who studies the life cycle of products from manufacturing to recycling or landfill.

Rajagopal said he thinks about Amazon from two different perspectives. On the one hand, Amazon is working to find ways to reduce packaging. On the other hand, it’s trying to make it easier for customers to shop online, which is naturally going to increase the amount of packaging needed overall.

Amazon’s size could be beneficial, however, Rajagopal said. Because it’s so large, it can innovate in ways that smaller companies can’t. And if Amazon finds a good solution, it can spread it to others. In industry parlance, this is called “innovation spillover”.

The packaging itself isn’t expensive, Rajagopal said. But as consumers become increasingly mindful of the amount of waste that comes with their purchases, overpackaging can come with a cost.

“If anything, the hook for them is ‘Hey we can call ourselves green,'” he said. “It brings in more business for the people who care about it.”

Amazon says it’s already making progress on reducing packaging. It says it has taken 1.5 million metric tons of packaging material out of its waste stream since 2015.

In 2019, Amazon introduced a paper-padded mailer and partially replaced those thin plastic packages that resemble bubble wrap. The company tested the durability of that new mailer in its Packaging Innovation Lab.

In 2021, Amazon said it will reduce the weight of plastic packaging per shipment by 7%. Last year, the company said its work to reduce the amount of paper for each package saved about 60,000 tons of cardboard annually.

Based on the company’s own numbers, Amazon will use about 97,000 metric tons of single-use plastic in its global operations in 2021, the most recent data available.

But some environmental groups question Amazon’s progress and are calling on the company to do more.

Oceana, an ocean conservation group that has studied the Amazon, said plastic pollution of the Amazon is actually increasing. Oceana estimates that the Amazon will generate 709 million pounds of plastic packaging waste in 2021, an 18% increase over its 2020 estimate.

Amazon has promised to reduce its plastic use in some markets, but has stopped doing so in the US, according to Oceana. A shareholder resolution that asked Amazon to commit to reducing its plastic use by a third did not pass at the annual shareholder meeting in May.

“Although we have eliminated hundreds of thousands of metric tons of new plastics each year in North America, we know we still have work to do,” Lindner said in a prepared statement. “We are committed to reducing single-use plastics in our packaging around the world, as well as completely eliminating excess packaging.”

Matt Littlejohn, senior vice president of strategic initiatives at Oceana, pointed to Amazon’s packaging lab as a sign that the company has the resources to reduce its plastic use.

“It sounds like they already have the solution — and if they need to develop additional ones, they can do it,” he said. “It appears to us that it is a matter of will.”

From TV to Crock-Pots

During a tour of the lab in May, Amazon representatives weren’t talking about plastics. Instead, they were most focused on a program that would help manufacturers ship products through Amazon’s network of warehouses without adding any additional Amazon packaging.

In other words, Amazon wants to stop putting a box in a box.

Amazon uses machine learning to determine which products naturally qualify to be shipped in their own container, such as a toy that already comes in its own branded box or a blanket that needs additional protection. is not required.

For items that aren’t a natural fit, Amazon works with sellers to adjust their own packaging to make it stand on its own.

The company said that in 2022, about 10% of products moved through Amazon warehouses were shipped without Amazon packaging.

Mahler, director of packaging innovation, said the lab does a lot of testing on TVs because they are relatively fragile and have historically had excessive packaging. “If we can get TVs to do that, Crock-Pots better come in line,” she said.

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