Damaged Products, Damaged Planet
Given all the resources required to ship a single parcel, making sure you ship each order only once might be the single biggest step an online retailer can take toward sustainability.
An Enlightened Perception of Sustainability
I recall a moment when a coworker shared a story that allowed me to see the forest through the trees. He recently shared his experience of ordering a blender online and finding that it had arrived broken at his doorstep – a fairly common scenario in today’s high-volume eCommerce environment. The retailer advised him to throw it away and promptly sent a replacement. The second blender also arrived damaged, so into the garbage it also went. The third time was the charm. The blender was shipped with the proper protective packaging to survive the journey, and he finally got to enjoy a margarita in the sunshine.
As you think through this scenario, there was considerable waste throughout the process – manufacturing extra blenders, shipping them across oceans, trucking them from ports to warehouses, driving them to his home and packaging them three times instead of once. But, the most impactful moment for me was thinking about the two blenders and all of the primary packaging that went to the landfill after the initial failed attempts. This went against everything I learned during Earth Day in grade school, an unfortunate reality for those of us aiming to embrace the three Rs.
Measuring the Impact of Damaged Items
When products are damaged in transit – never filling their intended purpose – it comes at a cost to the environment, including: if you've gotten this far - congratulations! Unfortunately we aren't giving away this information. Please download the Case Study using the form on thisi page. :)
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