Please, steal our playbook.

Taking care of our planet is an urgent need. As a California-based company, Minted and its people are highly aware of ongoing climate change, faced with increasingly severe fire seasons and years-long droughts.

E-commerce has experienced incredible growth during the pandemic in the past year, as we stayed home and shopped from our couches. The explosion of e-commerce growth is accompanied by an explosion of e-commerce packaging being shipped to homes. Seeing this, this year we set a goal to make dramatic earth-friendly changes to our packaging.

We expected this to be a fairly common goal, and that information and resources would be easy to find. We were wrong.

The bottom line is that it is very hard to find good, detailed information on how to replace e-commerce packaging components, gathered in one place. Our product development and supply chain teams poured themselves into research, working hard over many months to help us learn. (We want to share our newfound knowledge and research with other companies who have similar goals to improve their sustainability efforts. More on that in a minute.)

Today, on Earth Day 2021, we announce our packaging pledge:

• By the end of 2021, 100% of Minted stationery packaging will be recyclable or compostable.
• More than 80% of this packaging will be made from either recycled, post-consumer waste, plant-based, or sustainably-sourced materials.
• Minted will invest approximately $150,000 this year to meet this goal. On an ongoing basis, we expect to invest $100,000 annually on this first initiative, alone. It is our first commitment to helping combat climate change. Read Minted’s pledge & info page

Second, we’re announcing a $7,000 Minted Environmental Action grant for a high school or college student to help us create an Eco-Friendly Packaging Guide for other businesses to use.

Because we had such a difficult time finding the right suppliers and information, we want to share our playbook with the world. To help us get the word out, we will enlist the help of an enterprising student who wants to put their design or video production skills to work for the environment. The project will entail taking our learnings, building on top of them with further research and building an Eco-Friendly Packaging Guide for E-Commerce, including a PDF, video, and landing page. We invite students to apply for this project by filling out this form by May 15, 2021.

A few interesting things we have learned in our early research:

• The shift to WFH during the pandemic has decreased office waste output, which is a positive. That also, however, decreased the supply for PCW (post consumer waste) materials and packaging materials, in general.
• Switching packaging materials sometimes also requires that we, or our supply, purchase new equipment. The commitment is a partnership with a great deal of assistance from our suppliers (thank you!)..
• Minted is not the first to tread this path, but we are on the early side of what we hope will become a much larger movement. As more businesses come together to demand sustainable packaging, the market will shift and costs will come down. This benefits everyone. Let’s all be on the right side of change, together.
• For this first initiative, we are using some interesting and surprising materials: recycled coffee bags, recycled water bottles, corn and potato-based materials, and some papers whose production was powered by 100% wind or solar energy.

We’re still learning. And we welcome input.

These are only our first steps to move Minted toward more environmentally friendly practices. We will not stop here.

We have much more to learn and room to make improvements in other areas of our business, which will come. We welcome feedback and are particularly interested in hearing about:

• Other e-commerce companies who would like to share best practices.
• Nonprofit organizations that focus on sustainable packaging and manufacturing.
• Educating consumers about less familiar substrates, like recycled plants and fibers.