Packaging Waste

Amazon.com has made some limited progress with its Frustration-Free Packaging program. This is a good thing by many measures, and I wish it were more widespread. I wish they could extend it to all their subsidiaries, like Diapers.com

As most of you know, Brynna has been in gDiapers practically since she was born. We had many reasons to go this route over traditional disposables, and one of those reasons was the green-ness of it: processing diapers via the toilet and washing machine was much better than simply throwing diaper after diaper in the trash. We have for a long while received bulk shipments of gDiaper inserts directly from the manufacturer. Recently, they discontinued this direct-by-mail program, and shifted the service over to Diapers.com. We shrugged our shoulders and switched over too, and began receiving our shipments from them, instead.

By and large, the change has been transparent to us, but for one large frustration: the packaging. gDiapers would send us four packages of inserts packed tight into a 12" x 12" x 15" cardboard case. We've got a lot of those boxes in storage: they're a good size and very sturdy. Diapers.com, on the other hand, feels compelled to send us the exact same gDiapers case inside of a bigger box!



The Diapers.com outer case is another sturdy cardboard box, 16" x 16" x 19", and the space between is taken up with bags of air. If you work out the volume, you'll find that the Diapers.com case is, literally, twice as large.

And why is Diapers.com adding considerable expense to send off a pre-packaged product in a large and redundant box? I wish I knew. I could think of a few reasons, and none make much sense. The first is that they needed a place to put the packing slip, and couldn't simply stick it inside the the already-closed gDiaper box. This is a fairly ridiculous reason, since they could just slap it on the outside of the box in one of those plastic envelopes. Not a great solution, true, but better than sending off an extra few dollars of packing materials. A second possible reason is that sending gDiapers is new for them, and they simply haven't set things up properly yet. But this is a business, and I'd expect them to have their act together after a few months. The third, and most craven, reason I can think of is that Diapers.com is so vain and so insecure in their branding that they couldn't bear to ship a box that has someone else's logo on it.

For what little it is worth, I have contacted Diapers.com and told them about the absurdity of this situation. The customer service rep was very polite, and told me she'd send it on up the line. I'm not too hopeful. I think this irks me enough that I'll drop them entirely and source our gDiapers locally. We can get the same case from a local store, it just costs a bit more.