Amazon.com's green idea is brown

Classic brown cardboard will replace elaborate plastic packaging for some Amazon.com items.
(Credit: Amazon.com)Sometimes the greenest technology improvement is going back to the old low-tech option.
Amazon.com announced Monday it's working with retailers to cut back on the packaging you'll need to open to get to your goods.
The Seattle-based company plans to start shipping items in plain brown cardboard boxes, instead of putting a pre-boxed or plastically sealed item inside another Amazon box. The cardboard box will have Amazon, and in some cases the retailer's name, on the front.
Memory cards, for example, are often sold in disproportionately large clear plastic packaging to prevent shoplifting at physical stores. Transcend's memory cards when bought via Amazon will be shipped in a recycled cardboard envelope. Children's toys, such as a Fisher-Price pirate ship set, will be shipped in a plain brown box with cardboard padding and a plastic bag holding the toy people and whatnot.
So, in addition to being less annoying to open, the new packaging will also be more environmentally friendly, according to Amazon.
Amusingly, Amazon refers to the change as its "Frustration-Free Packaging Initiative." (How many companies acknowledge that they may have been frustrating you in the past?)
Consumers can plan to see the change immediately in the U.S., while international shoppers will have to stick it out with the "frustrating packaging" until early 2009.
But not everything you order will be easy to open. Amazon is starting with only 19 products from Microsoft, Fisher-Price, Mattel, and Transcend.
No doubt, the packaging change is also a way for the companies involved to save on materials and shipping costs.

Fisher-Price's Imaginext Adventures Pirate Ship will come like this.
(Credit: Amazon.com)
Amazon.com is getting rid of its box-inside-a-box shipping method for some items.
(Credit: Amazon.com)
Candace Lombardi is a journalist who divides her time between the U.S. and the U.K. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgets, or industrial machines, she enjoys examining the moving parts that keep our world rotating. Email her at CandaceLombardi@gmail.com. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET.





If you are going to be giving the gift unwrapped to the child, what does it matter whether it came in a display box or not? I would rather the brown box, it looks like you could use it for storage later on, where most toy packaging is destroyed in opening.
A very small CE company that I used to work for used plain brown boxes for web sales, and added a color cardboard sleeve with shrink wrap for retail sales. Given that Amazon is a huge channel for all of their vendors, there shouldn't be a problem with having the plain wrap and store packaged versions of their products.
And spiffy, if you buy your kids xmas presents from AMZ, there's this stuff called "gift wrapping paper" that you can buy, and wrap the presents in. Yeah, I know when they unwrap it, they will wonder what it is, but the surprise is heightened even more.
These plastic boxes don't even stop shoplifters. I've seen plastic boxes LITTERING our Best Buy near where I live when I noticed one halfway sticking out from underneath the shelves. When I reported it, they added it up and a friend of mine told me the items in there, their best guess...... the total came to 10,000 dollars!
So, I'm always happy when a company goes back to the basics, like screw caps for bottles and basic packaging for that 7 dollar item!
Well done!
As for less packaging, as long as it product arrives without being damaged, can you honestly say you will miss it?
Good for amazon for taking action against the manufacturers!
Funny thing:.now how can you tell is what you're receiving is truly a NEW item, and not a return? I mean, the Creative MP3 player I bought a while back came in its own eco-unfriendly, opener-frustrating, plastic blister packaging. I'm not so sure that for something that I just spent $300 on that I'd accept an OPEN item, no matter how tall the stack of bibles is that Jeff Bezos swears upon as to it being 'brand new'.
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by katchal
November 10, 2008 11:57 AM PST
- Love it! Now we won't have to endure 20 minutes of crying for the toys while mom and dad search for the wire cutters and try to open 6 layers of packaging crap while struggling to keep grasping little hands out of the path of the box cutter blade!
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