Christmas shopping online creates waste mountain of packaging from luxury retailers
- When you’ve built your strategy around offering a luxury experience right down to the packaging, adopting environment-friendly policies is fraught with risk
- Gift boxes, ribbons on every item, and tissue paper galore are among the frills customers have got used to; still, some retailers are changing
The Christmas season is upon us, and with it comes gifts, and the great debate about gift wrapping.
The habit of using posh decorative paper to add surprise and the festive factor to a gift has eco-warriors constantly up in arms, but what about that year-round habit of online shopping?
Luxury retailers in particular look to offer a premium experience through their deliveries. This means they often use lavish gift boxes, with ribbons and stickers on every item, receipts and return forms encased in thick envelopes, and tissue paper galore.
The environmental impact is undeniable, and that is not even considering the carbon footprint left by their offers of free shipping and returns. All this encourages consumers to use their homes as fitting rooms and DHL couriers as sales assistants, ferrying wish list items to and from the warehouse instead of the boutique floor.
Married couple and confessed “shopaholics” Jeremy Tan and Michelle Lam admit they take advantage of the free shipping on offer to buy more, which increases not only the size of the packages delivered to them but the quantity.
