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Running a business would require you to ensure everything’s in mint condition, from the product itself down to its packaging. With faulty packaging, some of the products you ship out to your customers might arrive broken or damaged, leaving a bad impression on your company. It’s important, thus, to pack your items properly so your customers would receive them in perfect condition.
When packaging your products, your company might be using thick sheets of bubble wrapping, which you wrap around the item numerous times until it’s entirely covered. While this helps protect your product, it’s not aiding in making the environment a good place to live in. As such, you may need to start looking for eco-friendly alternatives that’d still offer the best protection for your items. Listed below are eco-friendly packaging options you may want to consider for your business.
Woven Polypropylene
A polypropylene roll is a popular material that manufacturers use to create sacks for rice, cement, coffee, and other dry goods. While a woven polypropylene roll uses plastic, it could be eco-friendly since it’s durable and reusable. You don’t need to create more bags since you can grab your old ones, and they’d still serve their purpose.
If you’re running a manufacturing business, you could allow your customers to bring their old woven polypropylene bags and reuse them for packing your products. This way, you’d not only save on packaging costs, but you’d also promote helping the environment.
Biodegradable Packaging Peanuts
If you’re shipping your products through a courier, you may not expect them to arrive at your customers in their original condition. While couriers would try their best to ensure your products arrive without any dents, there might be unforeseen circumstances they couldn’t avoid. For this reason, you need to ensure your items are wrapped securely and safely for transit.
For fragile items, consider using biodegradable packaging peanuts to keep your product tucked in and protected. While a regular peanut filler works, going for biodegradable materials would be beneficial to the planet. You could use them guilt-free, knowing they’re not harming the environment.
Corrugated Bubble Wrap
Bubble wrap is one of the most popular packaging materials as it’s easy to find and use. You just wrap it around your fragile or boxed items, and they’d quickly have a layer of protection, keeping them safe during transit. However, ordinary bubble wraps use plastic materials, making them unfriendly to the environment.
To allow yourself to protect your products without using plastic, covering them with corrugated bubble wrap could provide the security you need. While there’s no presence of air in each of the bubbles, the wrap could keep your products safe and intact during shipment.
Corrugated bubble wraps use upcycled corrugated cardboard as their main material rather than plastic. While they may look odd, the small cuts present in them allow for maximum protection, just like a bubble wrap.
Mushroom Packaging
Using Styrofoam and plastic is frowned upon by environmentalists as they only provide temporary use while damaging the earth permanently. While packing materials that could be reused may be expensive, you could consider mushroom packaging.
Similar to single-use containers, mushroom packaging allows you to store your products easily without causing harm to the environment. However, you need to ensure that what you place inside are all dry items as moisture and liquid could damage the material.
For better protection, you could have your mushroom packaging custom fit to your products’ needs. With a perfect fit, you’re guaranteed your products won’t break while in transit, avoiding any loss of income.
Returnable Packaging
If you’re selling beverages, using returnable packing would be helpful to the environment as you won’t be adding to the landfill. In the old days, a person selling milk would come to your doorstep to drop off a fresh batch of milk and get your old bottles for them to clean and reuse. You could revive the practice and implement them in your business.
For the beverage bottles, you could offer a refund every time customers return a jug. This would allow the customers to save money and prevent them from adding more bottles into the landfill. Aside from this, you could also save money as you won’t need to purchase new bottles for every beverage you produce.
Plantable Packaging
One of the best packaging ideas that’d surely give back to the environment is using plantable packaging. This type of packaging has seeds embedded in the material, which customers could bury in the ground. All they have to do is to dig the container in healthy soil and water it for a while. Afterward, it’d grow into healthy vegetables, flowers, or herbs.
While plantable packaging could be an added expense to your company, just imagine how the world would benefit if people use this instead. Who knows, maybe other companies would follow your lead and switch to plantable packaging, too.
Minimalist Packaging
While you may want to give your customers the best presentation for your products, you may want to go for a minimalist design instead. This way, you could help save the environment while cutting down on packaging costs.
Adding things like paper strips, confetti, ribbon, or wrapper to your packaging might indeed be tempting. But while these items can truly add beauty to your packaging, you’d be helping more the environment if you avoid using them, especially as they won’t give added benefit to your product at all.
When designing your packaging, ensure you only include the things you need. Apart from the product itself, the next thing you could add is its container box and nothing more. Try to have a minimalist print as well. This could also help the environment because you’d be using less ink.
You don’t have to worry much about adopting minimalist packaging for your shipments. This trend is continuing to pick up pace and catching consumers’ eyes. It’s a new design approach that many people today seem to enjoy.
The Takeaway
Choosing the right packaging for your product could be challenging, especially since you need to prioritize the cost and its purpose. While going for eco-friendly packaging may have added costs, the things you could give back to Earth would be priceless. It’s an act you could always be proud of as you’re taking part in making the world a better place to live in for future generations.
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