Sending Post Sustainably With Paper Padded Envelopes

With the rise of e-commerce and a huge increase in the number of shippings sustainability is a serious factor. Millions of parcels are delivered to people around the world packed in paper, plastic boxes or envelopes. The UK based company Emailers Packaging came up with a new possibility for sustainable shipping: the paper padded envelope.

100 Percent Paper, Zero Plastics
The environmentally friendly achievement of the developers at Emailers Packaging sounds promising. They invented a solution for padded envelopes, which consists of paper with a unique embossed bubble texture instead of using bubble wrap. It creates a cushioned padding to keep items save when sending it via post. According to director Alan Rea this is or at least should be the future of mail packaging: “We believe this will seriously challenge the plastic bubble lined bags that are unsustainable in today’s environment.” In various tests, they tried to find out whether this solution really works or not. Actually, in a number of areas the paper padded envelopes got better results the plastic bubble bags.

Specifically Designed Manufacturing
Because the company stresses great emphasis on UK produced products, it has built its own machine for the production of the envelopes. What Emailers Packaging does is quite easy: They use biodegradable paper. Furthermore, they duplicated the shape of the plastic bubbles by embossing the paper fibres. This creates a cushion effect to protect valuable objects in the post. In the future, more of these envelopes might be used to ship products around the world.

What do you think about this development? What other ideas for making our shipping more sustainable do you have or know?