A Study on the Waste Reduction of Parcel Delivery Packaging

The volume of parcel delivery is steadily increasing with the rapid growth of the global online e-commerce market. However, a large amount of packaging materials used for these parcel delivery is finally causing environmental problems as waste. The rapid increase of these packaging waste has been making many countries to research ways to reduce the generation of distribution packaging waste. In this study, we have measured the empty space ratio for 131 packagings of parcel delivery purchased through the several domestic online stores in order to investigate the present situation in connection with the degree of excessive or overpack in korean parcel delivery packagings, so that 64 packagings were exceeded 50% in the empty space ratio. And we have suggested ways to reduce the generation of distribution packaging waste raised by e-commerce-based parcel delivery through analyzing the previous research and case studies ; one is to optimize and minimize the packaging design by safe transit test(field-to-lab test), another is to develop a reusable & returnable transport packaging and system applicable in the domestic supply chain, the other is to regulate directly with a policy.