Zalando, Europe’s leading online fashion platform, has adopted a sustainability strategy focusing on a several issues to reduce and compensate for its environmental impact.
In addition to introducing and increasing the number of collections of garments made from sustainable materials, it has also taken concrete action in relation to packaging, a very important issue because it must fulfil the task of ensuring and maintaining the quality of the products shipped.
Zalando is constantly looking for solutions that reduce the volume of packaging and the amount of material used to compose it as much as possible.
The sustainable solutions currently implemented include:
– The boxes in different formats made of 100% recycled cardboard, with integrated adhesive closure based on vegetable starch, therefore without the need to use additional adhesive tapes. The outer layer of the cardboard is not printed, while the orange logo uses water-based ink.
– Shipping bags, 80% of which are made from post-consumer recycled materials, from other end-of-life products such as plastic bottles.
– Polybags, made of more than 60% recycled polyethylene.
– Beauty bags, for the shipment of cosmetic products, initially sent in padded plastic bags converted later into bags of 100% recycled paper.
An interesting experiment of reuse of packaging was also implemented, starting from September 2019 in the North European market with customers from Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark the packaging became reusable. Made from recycled materials, it can be folded to take up as little space as possible, returned to the sender with the return label and placed in the most customer-friendly mailbox.

Source and image: corporate.zalando.com/

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