We've all received small items in oversized boxes: Amazon says it has 'more work to do' to stop wasteful packaging

If good things come in small packages, then surely something quite bad had to be inside the gigantic box on my doorstep.

Turned out it was just a $40 foam roller I'd bought on Amazon a few days earlier, on the advice of my physio who is trying to solve a stubborn niggle in my neck.

On the one hand, you had to give credit to Amazon.

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Customised rainbow-themed tape proudly sealed the box, in a sweet nod to the Mardi Gras parade which had lit up Sydney just two days earlier.

Nice touch, Jeff Bezos.

But a cavernous box dwarfed the 90cm-long, 15cm-diameter foam roller inside.

It was so vast and empty in there, it could have echoed.

Shouldn't the online behemoth, which sends out billions of packages every year and has an eye-popping market cap of $1.4 trillion, be doing better?

In the newsroom the next day, colleagues swapped war stories of silly-sized boxes carrying objects which humbly occupy a fraction of the space.

And it wasn't just Amazon.

Cosmetic companies, sending out gels, mascaras and other little beauty products in oversized boxes, seemed to be a repeat offender.

Know more? Been sent ridiculous packaging? Email msaunokonoko@nine.com.au

I took pictures of the box, but they don't do it justice.

To try and get scale, I placed our pug inside. She would have fit six-times over.

"We know we have more work to do," an Amazon spokesperson said, when contacted by 9news.com.au.

"Since 2015, we've reduced packaging weight per-shipment by 38 per cent and eliminated more than 1.5 million tonnes of packaging," they said, declaring the company "will continue to make progress towards becoming a more sustainable business."

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The spokesperson added Amazon was "committed to delivering products safely while innovating to find new ways to reduce packaging and increase recyclability".

Amazon said its Australian fulfilment network uses boxes which are 100 per cent recyclable, and single-use air pillows have been replaced with recyclable packing paper.

According to its website, one of Amazon's top priorities is the elimination of "additional packaging".

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It uses machine learning to work out which products are suitable for flexible packaging, such as padded mailers and bags, which are much lighter than boxes.

These algorithms have reduced the use of corrugate boxes by over 35 per cent in North America and Europe in the past five years, the company said.

Last year Amazon signed up the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation, which sets packaging targets for reusable, recyclable, or compostable materials.

It did not divulge to 9news.com.au how many boxes its Australian operation uses every year.

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According to some estimates, in 2021 the company shipped 7.7 billion packages globally.

Two University of Washington researchers calculated that if each of those packages was a 30cm-square box, and they were vertically stacked, the pile would be six times higher than the 384,400 km distance from the Earth to the Moon.

Laid end-to-end, they would wrap around the Earth 62 times.

In North America, Amazon has rolled out kerbside bins so customers can send waste packaging to a facility for recycling.

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