Your Amazon Prime Day packages will look different than the boxes you re used to -- and they ll come with an unexpected surprise.
Between now and Halloween, Amazon will ship boxes with a new eco-friendly design that has a large white pumpkin on the side. Customers that draw on the pumpkin and scan the nearby QR code with the phone s camera to see the pumpkin drawing sort of come to life through the magic of augmented reality."The new experience is a low-cost way for customers to celebrate and a fun way to reuse boxes before dropping them in the recycling bin," Amazon said in a statement. Shoppers will need Amazon s AR app to use it and can create a customizable pumpkin, similar to Snapchat s AR filters.
Perhaps it s a bit of a gimmick, but Amazon (AMZN) wants to bring attention to its environment-saving initiatives. The company has an 85-person team devoted to improving its packaging to help reduce the environmental impact shipping contributes to.Shopping online uses seven times as much cardboard as picking up items from a store, according to the commodity data analytics company Fastmarkets. E-commerce generated 1.3 million tons of container board in North America in 2018 — a jump up from 1.1 million the year before, Fastmarkets says.
"My goal would be zero packaging of any type over the next couple years," Kim Houchens, who leads Amazon s packaging team, told CNN business last year.
Other sustainable initiatives include labeling 25,000 Climate Pledge Friendly" products and driving 100,000 electric vehicles in the coming years.
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