A look inside Amazon’s push to eliminate plastic packaging

SUMNER, Wash. — At Amazon’s Packaging Innovation Lab south of Seattle, boxes are dropped from different heights, jiggled for hours to simulate truck transport, and crushed under weights designed to replicate the pressure of stacked cargo. 

The goal: to ensure that products arrive undamaged — without the benefit of plastics and extra bulky boxes.

The e-commerce giant says it’s working to phase out plastic from the envelopes, bags, boxes and cushioning it uses to ship everything from bobby pins to bicycles. A recent tour of the Sumner facility and an adjacent fulfillment center featured robotic assembly lines making paper bags and trimmed-down boxes to facilitate that transition.

Amazon says it favors paper because there’s better infrastructure in place for customers to easily recycle the material and for it to be turned back into usable items.

“We’re shifting towards all-paper packaging material,” confirmed John Sly, Amazon’s senior lab and field manager at the Sumner site.

An Amazon spokesperson wouldn’t commit to a target date, saying only that the company is working toward the goal and tracking progress in its annual sustainability reports. 

• Amazon said in its most recent report that it reduced its use of single-use plastic delivery packaging by 16.4% globally last year.
• In October 2024, the company announced that it had eliminated the inflated plastic pillows from packages worldwide, replacing them with crunched-up recycled paper for cushioning. 
• More than half of its North American fulfillment centers were weaned off all plastic shipping materials by 2024. As a result, 37% of shipments that year contained single-use plastic delivery packaging — a decrease from 65% the year before.

The shift follows lobbying by the nonprofit Oceana and some Amazon shareholders to reduce plastic use, and as Amazon pursues ambitious net zero climate emissions targets. 

But despite the packaging wins, the bigger picture reveals much harder challenges. Amazon reported a 6% increase in its carbon footprint for last year, driven by data center expansion. And while it’s deploying electric vans for last-mile deliveries, promises of faster shipping are pushing emissions up, according to new research.

Automating the push towards paper

A key strategy for making packaging more sustainable is incorporating robotics that speed and customize the process.

One solution is an automated system that folds lightweight boxes around individual items. It uses thinner, more sustainable corrugated paper than found in traditional boxes. It’s pliable enough to wrap around products as they move along a conveyor — cutting to size, folding and sealing without requiring added cushioning.

Another technology uses repurposed machines that formerly made plastic bags, swapping in paper. One of the upsides to the solution is fulfillment centers are already built to fit the devices, so the machines just need to be retrofit to handle and seal paper edges instead of plastic.

On a recent morning, Todd Grasser, an Amazon process assistant, was feeding in products including a box of probiotic supplements and a Bluey character coloring set.

The machine’s estimated top speed is 500 items an hour, Grasser said. “Personally, I do about 475.”

The automated packaging solutions are currently limited to single items, which can apply when someone’s order is sourced from different fulfillment centers or if it includes just one product.

The company is also partnering with manufacturers to ship items in their original packaging. That avoids, say, putting a boxed blender inside a bigger box when it doesn’t need additional protection. As part of that initiative, Amazon has worked with Proctor & Gamble to make boxed versions of Tide detergent and Playmobil sets that are offered in brown shipping boxes that can be flipped inside out after delivery to reveal colorful toy photos.

Moving to more sustainable packaging requires testing its properties to ensure that goods arrive to customers undamaged.

The shift means balancing multiple needs, Sly said, that include “prioritizing for protection and minimizing packaging material needed, while also still hitting the delivery speed that we promised.”

The company can move fast in adopting more sustainable packaging and it has in adopting paper bags and paper filler, “but we have to get the right solution,” Amazon spokesperson Saige Kolpack added. “There’s implications down the entire network that we have to consider.”