Black Friday Sustainability: Three ways to help e-commerce go green

The US shopping phenomenon is now part of the British retail calendar. So how can we ensure that Black Friday doesn’t negatively impact on recycling systems, and ensure that the packaging that protects all those goods that we buy does actually get recycled? Tom Campbell-White, European Strategic Development Director at DS Smith Recycling, explains.

Since landing on our shores in 2010, Black Friday, and its younger sibling Cyber Monday, have led to a sharp spike in purchases made both online and instore over the third weekend in November, leading to the weekend being known as the “holiday shopping weekend”. According to research by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), three-quarters of retailers offered some form of promotion last year, and sales online far exceeded those on the high street. Research from November 2017 showed that 72% of people shopped on their computers or their phones,1 but this year, e-commerce sales are expected to be even higher – 98% of Black Friday shoppers in the UK are planning to shop online.2

Online retail trade body IMRG reported that £1.4bn was spent on Black Friday in 2017 – an increase of 11.6% on the year before – and according to PwC, British shoppers spent £1.1 billion on the following Cyber Monday, a day which specifically encourages consumers to shop online.3

The rise of e-commerce shopping, and the appeal of sale-price products during the holiday shopping weekend, sees a lot of products being shipped from stores to buyers’ homes. This, in turn, leads to large quantities of packaging that need to be recovered from domestic recycling collections in a way that allows that packaging to become high quality material for recycling.

At DS Smith, we believe in approaching society’s challenges with a big-picture perspective, not just tackling individual parts. So how can packaging design and production, e-commerce, and recycling come together to make Black Friday greener?
more detail at: https://www.dssmith.com/recycling/insights/blogs/2018/11/black-friday-sustainability-three-ways-to-help-e-commerce-go-green

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