Sustainable packaging for e-commerce is increasingly becoming the focus of major online retailers. Young founders from Hamburg, who have developed Boomerang, a reusable solution for shipping, are also realising this.
And the idea has been well received. The industry can no longer ignore the issue of reusable packaging and is looking for solutions. At interpack, Jan Malte Andresen spoke to Marc Engelmann, CEO, and Katharina Kreutzer, CPO at Boomerang, in our dedicated start-up zone.
As with many other consumers, Marc Engelmann's waste paper bins were always full and a fourth one was almost necessary.
Episode 10: „Making online retail greener"
Despite the technical possibilities of staying in touch that we have learnt to appreciate during the pandemic, nothing can replace a personal face-to-face conversation. Richard Clemens agrees. He has a clear answer to the question of whether trade fairs like interpack are still needed:
I was very, very annoyed by the sheer amount of packaging waste that we all produce when we order online. And then I did some soul-searching and thought about what could be done to reduce packaging waste and that was the birth of Boomerang. I then developed the first prototypes in my living room and took them to companies. And I always had the hope in the back of my mind that the EU would do something about it and take up the issue at some point.
The first pilots of Boomerang's shipping bags have been on the market since December 2022 and are tackling an issue that the industry increasingly needs to address. What has already begun in the to-go sector for food and drink is also set to be applied in the e-commerce sector - reusable packaging and deposit systems.
Reusable as a solution
This also brings with it difficulties - an established industry has to adapt to changing consumer wishes and new regulations at national and international level. Boomerang offers a solution for shipping that is not only good for the environment thanks to the reusable system - the materials used also take current sustainability trends into account:
We use more or less mono-material and the materials on the packaging that are not made of the same material are only sewn on, not glued on, so they can be removed again. This means that we can ultimately make a mono-material - polypropylene in this case - available for the recycling process again.
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