The Environment & Packaging: Why should you care?

It’s easy to live day to day without understanding the impact some of our choices make on the environment, which has led to some pretty scary statistics. Next time you’re out for a takeaway coffee, remember that 7 million coffee cups are thrown away in the UK every day – so if you’re a regular coffee drinker, a re-usable cup would be more beneficial.

Now I’m not here to tell you not to enjoy a coffee in the morning, but I think it’s important, especially from a business point of view that what we produce and provide to customers can be a reflection on our own brand.

Especially now as many individuals are interested in living a more sustainable lifestyle, their purchase choices will also change and that could be difference between your business and a competitor.

Recyclable Packaging

If you’re an ecommerce business then packaging is part of the daily work load but it doesn’t have to be damaging to the environment. It’s common to see online comments of customers asking brands ‘is this recyclable?’ or ‘biodegradable’ as more people want to make better decisions, these questions are frequently cropping up time and time again.

Ecommerce isn’t going anywhere and in-fact as a marketing channel, it continues to grow year on year, this means more orders and therefore more packaging.

The natural step to take would be to research types of recyclable packaging and perhaps your product needs something bespoke due to the size and/or shape of your product. However other factors come into play such as cost and functionality.

If your business deals with packaging in a different format such as corporate gifting, you might be thinking you have very little control over the type of packaging that comes with this, but you would be wrong.

B2B and B2C

Naturally, depending on the type of service you provide, your packaging requirements will be different but that doesn’t mean they both can’t be friendly to the environment.

A good example of this, is our own eco-friendly packaging, in which we’ve built relationships with many chocolate brands who themselves want to be more conscious about the environment and their own sustainability efforts.

By providing out B2B customers with a product that not only sourced responsibility but comes in 100% recyclable and biodegradable packaging, they can pass on the product to their B2C audience, with confidence that everyone has benefited from the sustainable packaging.

Sustainability doesn’t just come from the exterior packaging, shoppers in particular are hungry for the actual product to be sustainable, such as clothing for example, which has boomed in the last few years, where many brands have made huge changes to their own systems to use recycled materials for both their products and packaging, so nothing goes to waste.

Some brands are even going the extra mile to give customers a great incentive which involves them bringing in any unwanted clothes and accessories in exchange for gift vouchers – very clever!