Amazon is Brown Bagging it in Colorado for Mother Earth

As long as your order has nothing heavy or angular, the new brown bag packaging from Amazon will work just fine. It literally brought back nostalgic feelings of my brown bag lunch in high school. Yep, high school, and yes, my mom put a note and a Little Debbie snack in there.

Amazon has taken over, right? We see them everywhere, they often deliver items to the same address more than once a day. So clearly, they have to do what they can to cut down on waste. The blue and white plastic bubble mailers have to be piling up mountains high in our landfills.

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In 2019 the Chicago Tribune reported that "the problem with the plastic mailers is twofold: they need to be recycled separately, and if they end up in the usual stream, they gum up recycling systems and prevent larger bundles of materials from being recycled."

So enter the thin brown bag mailer. It's thin and brown and can be recycled like a cardboard box. In my case, we can put them in the compost.

Amazon states on their website that they're trying, with the use of machine algorithms to reduce the packaging waste.

To optimize packaging selections at Amazon’s scale, we use machine learning algorithms to arrive at the best possible packaging choices for deliveries. That means identifying which products don’t need additional packaging, and which smaller products are suitable for flexible packaging, such as padded mailers and bags, which are up to 75% lighter than similar-sized boxes.

When packaging weighs less and is the right size to protect customer orders, we can pack more orders into each delivery, resulting in fewer trips and less fuel burned.