I own an e-commerce company and we do a lot of shipping and receiving. We work hard to minimize our packaging waste (in fact we don’t use any packaging material.) I see a lot of waste coming in from various vendors and to be fair some it simply seems hard to eliminate. In other cases, the waste is just ridiculous.

There is one example in particular I think warrants recognition. We occasionally purchase shipping supplies from Uline because they offer next day shipping. Every time we order from them they send us a 1 inch thick glossy print catalog with our order. And just in case we lost the catalogs they sent us with our orders they kindly send us another one in the mail. Over the course of 4 months we collected about 50 pounds worth of catalogs from them. We never ordered from the catalog–we always ordered online. (Its almost as bad–if not worse–than the AOL CDs that used to be everywhere.)

We are considering adding a print catalog to our business this year but we are only going to send the hard copy upon specific request and where the customer can not be convinced to accept an electronic version. I also got a lot of other good tips from Ecowriter’s post about green ad materials so we’ll try to minimize our impact there too.

We are going to do what we can to minimize the ad waste that we create but we are also going to look for suitable alternative vendors who make reasonable efforts to do the same.