The e-commerce sector is growing and the number of online shoppers continues to rise. Where initially, with Amazon, we mainly bought books on the internet, today we buy everything, from clothing to food products. This volume of online purchases corresponds to an enormous quantity of packaging required to wrap items, and, as a consequence, the amount of waste is growing at an extraordinary rate. To counter this trend, a number of companies have now decided to focus on reusable packaging, thus contributing to the construction of circular economy models. One of the first was Finnish company RePack, which has created packaging that can be reused up to forty times.

How RePack works

RePack makes a range of reusable packaging available to its partner e-commerce companies; member brands, in turn, allow their customers to choose the RePack packaging option, a choice that usually includes an incentive for the buyer. Once the consumer has received and unwrapped their purchase, all they need to do is return the packaging free of charge at the nearest postbox, so that it can be recycled.

Packaging: from cost to resource

The system devised by the Finnish company has proved truly effective, to the extent that the packaging return rate among customers stands at 95 per cent. Consumers are incentivised through discounts on future purchases; when RePack receives the returned packaging, the discount is automatically activated. The most common reward is a voucher worth a 10 per cent discount valid on the next purchase made from any retailer offering the RePack option. This is precisely one of the strengths of this strategy: the vouchers do not need to be used again with the same company, thereby triggering a virtuous circle that encourages ever more retailers to adopt the RePack option.

RePack boosts sales

In addition to its environmental benefits, RePack's recyclable packaging is also advantageous for businesses from an economic standpoint. It increases the average order value by up to 30 per cent and, in general, the volume of sales. "When our web store customers receive their products, the package is our business card," explained Jussi Hämäläinen, manager of Scandinavian Outdoor. "When we started working together with RePack we believed it was the right choice, and our customers think the same: the number of satisfied customers and the reduction in packaging costs prove it."

How much CO2 is saved

According to the action plan The Npe: catalysing action, born from the programme The new plastics economy launched by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in 2016 and designed to reduce the impact of the packaging sector, innovative product commercialisation models, such as the one proposed by RePack, can lead to a reduction in CO2 emissions quantifiable at between 80 and 85 per cent.