After three years in the making, a new solution to the shoebox is announced- and it’s pretty sleek too!
“It’s hard to imagine something as simple as the shoebox being
completely overhauled. But Puma and Fuseproject have done just that, in
a design that will completely transform the brand’s supply chain—saving
millions in electricity, fuel, and water.
“Rethinking the shoebox is an incredibly complex problem, and the
cost of cardboard and the printing waste are huge, given that 80M are
shipped from China each year,” Béhar tells FastCompany.com. “Cargo
holds in the ships can reach temperatures of 110 degrees for weeks on
end, so packaging becomes an enormous problem. This solution protects
the shoes, and helps stores to stock them, while saving huge costs in
materials.”
After spending 21 months studying box fabrication and shipping,
Fuseproject realized that any improvement to that already lean system
would merely be incremental. So instead, the “clever little bag”
combines the two packaging components of any shoe sale—the bag and the
box—with high-tech ingenuity.
The bag tightly wraps an interior cardboard scaffolding—giving it
shape and reducing cardboard use by 65%. Moreover, without that shiny
box exterior, there’s no laminated cardboard (which interferes with
recycling). There’s no tissue paper inside. And there’s no throw-away
plastic bag. The bag itself is made of recycled PET, and it’s
non-woven—woven fibers increase density and materials use—and stitched
with heat, so that it’s less manufacturing intensive.
The impact: Puma estimates that the bag will slash water, energy,
and fuel consumption during manufacturing alone by 60%—in one year,
that comes to a savings of 8,500 tons of paper, 20 million mega joules
of electricity, 264,000 gallons of fuel, and 264 gallons of water.
Ditching the plastic bags will save 275 tones of plastic, and the
lighter shipping weight will save another 132,000 gallons of diesel.
The roll-out is planned for next year. After that? Hopefully, the design will become ubiquitous.” via gizmodo.
