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.