It is a common message for all the online-shopping giants, for I have been an avid user of all of them (amazon, myntra, flipkart etc)

Respected Sir/Ma'am

I like to bring to your kind attention that I am one of the users of your online shopping application, having purchased several products from you since the time of your inception in India; I have always liked your quality service. Online shopping had surely made the job easy, but it comes at a price, that our natural environment has to pay. Your company is doing a great work, which is worth promoting, but plastic pollution is a situation to ponder on as well.

I can recall how your delivery has improved over time, but sadly, it has compromised with plastic input, in initial days, all the purchased commodities were sent in a single box or brown bag, on a specified date, with limited amount of plastics. But, I have recently observed, when I ordered several different items together, I received them at different times of the same day, which were packaged in bags totally inappropriately larger than their actual size, something that could have been avoided.  Do you see what I am trying to convey sir/ma’am? The amount of plastic is enormous, most of the times it goes directly to the bin, It’s alarming, just multiply it with the number of customers you have, the number of shipments in a month, see how gigantic that is? And it will continue to accumulate, if not taken care of.

Plastic in itself is essential if used appropriately for purposes it is actually meant to, to pack something that can spill or is fragile. You have surely made the delivery process faster, by distributing the jobs to several local vendors; however, this is a problem that cannot be neglected. The real issue I am trying to ask you to solve is to find solutions for the excess amount of unmanageable plastic waste, adding to the existing problem.

However, I understand you are still blooming, and I wish you all growth, some solutions that I can recommend:

1) Option ‘send all purchases together’ in your website along with a ‘need urgently’ option, former could be further promoted with cash back offers/discounts/redeem points.

2) Use of cardboard boxes, recycled packaging e.g. brown paper(that you earlier used) for books, sealed cosmetics, light weight products, groceries, packaged food products, garments, and other non-fragile items, since these doesn’t require even bubble wrap protections much, I say this because I have received bubble-wrapped books.

3) Use of biodegradable plastics(please avoid use of oxo-plastics, as it is a huge menace in itself, instead several other e.g. starch based plastics etc. are also available or if you could find even better alternative).

4) Generating an algorithm to sort orders according to addresses and localities, along with point 1, could help send designated set of delivery guys to a place, reducing vehicular use, if cartons are huge, vans could be used instead of bikes, to reduce the physically deleterious health effects on them.

Thank you