15 September 2023

When a fiber is not a fiber



By Jim Thompson

On the 11th of August, the Wall Street Journal ran an article titled, "Amazon wants to deliver your order without a box, but neighbors may see your snore strips." The point of the article is that Amazon is attempting to minimize the number of Amazon boxes used to deliver your goods. Makes sense for Amazon.

Reading further, it appears Amazon is intending to push the box requirements upstream to their suppliers of goods.

In other words, Amazon does not want to put your new coffee maker in yet another box, reasoning that the manufacturer's box is all that is needed.

For some products, this may work. For others, I suspect this will require the manufacturer to beef up their box in order to withstanding the shipping conditions.

The long enduring corrugated box Amazon wants to eliminate was developed and has evolved over the last 120 years to be one durable shipping container.

Most manufacturers expect their product, in its own packaging, to be delivered within another box. First, a multi-product box to get to the warehouse, and then, in the case of Amazon, broken down to individual boxes for delivery to you.

Many coffee makers may be delivered to Target, for instance, in one large shipping container. They are taken out of that shipping container and placed on Target's shelf right in front of said shelf. They are not tossed in the back of an Amazon truck to be bounced around town before arriving on your doorstep.

This will likely mean beefing up the coffee maker box in order to make the trip. But that is a different kind of box, not a corrugated container. It is one with graphics and other features. This is the box that will be beefed up.

Let's pretend all this happens domestically in the United States. It is very likely that overall, more fiber will be used to make durable shipping boxes this way (A dozen coffee makers within one corrugated shipping box now have to be strong enough endure as individual shipping boxes once that that large container is broken open).

What just happened in our industry? Business moved from International Paper, maker of the Amazon box, to Graphics Packaging, maker of the highly printed individual box. More fiber is used overall, just in different applications.

Note: this is for illustrative and speculative purposes only. I have no direct knowledge of the plans of coffee maker manufacturers, International Paper nor Graphics Packaging.

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Note: Neither I or anyone on the Paperitalo staff own any individual pulp and paper stocks.

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