How Stuffed is Your Package? Let’s #ShipNaked  

Activist

How Stuffed is Your Package? Let’s #ShipNaked  

Ready to put on the pressure? #ShipNaked with Sheila Morovati, founder of Habits of Waste, and put the pressure on big box stores to work toward eliminating unnecessary waste in packaging. – KH

One of today’s best conveniences is also one of the most frustrating. With a click of a button we are able to—seemingly by magic—receive products we need while saving ourselves hours of time that would otherwise be spent driving to different stores in hopes they are stocked with what we’re looking for. This convenience is so great that we often find ourselves buying things we might not even need.

Then the package arrives. It’s usually a large cardboard box full of plastic packaging, and then amidst all that we will find the item(s) we ordered just a day or two prior. We are in awe of this magical system yet most of us also experience a wave of guilt each and every time we open one of these beloved packages. We brace ourselves to see how much waste was created this time and how much we just harmed our precious planet for the sake of our convenience.

This was the way things went for me until one day I had ordered a dust buster, aka a hand-held mini-vacuum. Low and behold, it arrived just like that—in its own box with the shipping label stuck on the manufacturer’s box. No extra cardboard. No additional internal packaging. I was awestruck—it was like someone turned on the lights in a dark room that had no way out.

Why don’t more packages that can be shipped without excess packaging come “naked” like my dust buster? I started to do some research, and according to the EPA over 63% of the planet’s solid waste comes from packaging. 

Annually, 850 million tons of paper and cardboard are thrown away, which equates to approximately 1 billion trees. Amazon alone ships out 1.7 million packages per day. A recent study by Oceana found that Amazon.com generated 465 million pounds of plastic packaging waste in 2019. The number of plastic air pillows could circle the globe 500 times! Oceana further estimated that up to 22.44 million pounds of Amazon.com’s plastic packaging ended up in the world’s freshwater and marine ecosystems as pollution in the same year, or “roughly equivalent to a delivery van’s worth of plastic being dumped into major rivers, lakes and the oceans every 70 minutes.” Yikes! 

 In response, we launched the campaign #ShipNaked. It’s an effort to mitigate millions of pounds of packaging waste that is totally unnecessary. (FYI my dust buster came in perfect shape!) Like many of our previous grassroots campaigns at Habits of Waste we ask consumers to use a 1-click email campaign and social media to make our voices heard. 

We have power when we come together collectively.

 Our key targets are the “big guys,” big box stores like Amazon, Walmart and Target. They can and will shape the future of packaging. Hopefully, we can continue to benefit from online shipping, and the time savings it affords, without contributing to more damage to our planet, wiping away the guilt we face every time our items arrive at our homes and offices stuffed with disposable packaging.

 Our job is to refuse as much waste as we possibly can. Please join us in our #ShipNaked campaign today. Make your voice heard, by clicking on our pre-written email, and post a photo of your next overly packaged shipment, tagging the company who sent it to you with hashtag #ShowUsYourPackage + #ShipNaked!

Sheila Morovati is the founder of Habits of Waste, providing solutions, and allowing individuals to live more eco-consciously without overwhelm. She sees habitual waste throughout society and creates change to protect our environment. Sheila successfully spearheaded the historic ban on single-use plastic straws and cutlery in the City of Malibu.

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