Your business might take sustainability seriously by implementing eco-friendly packaging, but are your customers recycling it? While converting your packaging to eco-friendly materials is the first step in reducing your business’s carbon footprint, your customers should then actually recycle it.
Encouraging your customers to recycle your packaging is essential for reducing waste. While we can’t guarantee everyone will recycle these materials, you can try motivating them with the following tips.
Print a Reminder on the Package
After the excitement of opening a product, a customer might not even realize that a material is recyclable. Printing a message on your cosmetic packaging (or whatever product packaging your business uses) will help remind customers that they can throw the box, jar, tin, or tube in the recycling bin. For example, when you receive certain food delivery orders, the ice pack will have the phrase “recycle me” printed on the outside to remind customers not to throw it in the trash.
Market Your Products As Sustainable
Are you using eco-friendly materials yet not using sustainability as a marketing tool for your brand? You can’t expect customers to know they can recycle your packaging if they don’t realize your business focuses on sustainability. Advertise on your website the efforts your company is taking to encourage recycling practices so that customers know about them before buying a product. Adding this to your website could also be a selling point for several people.
Develop Frustration-Free Packaging
The easier you make it to recycle a package, the more likely a customer will do so. This is what developing frustration-free packaging is. For example, you might wish to provide a sustainable solution for customers' recycling needs and use packaging made from recyclable materials that can be quickly sorted and processed in recycling facilities, reducing environmental impact; you can do that by using resources like Packaging Chimp cardboard tubes. Could you use recyclable materials only as they reduce excess filler materials within the packaging to simplify recycling?
Make Suggestions for Reusing Packaging
Your customers don’t necessarily need to recycle your product packaging. They can always reuse it, too! Make direct suggestions on your packaging on how customers can reuse a material. For instance, if you sell something in a glass jar, you might suggest a customer use the package to organize a pantry, hold office supplies, turn it into a plant propagation station, etc.
Encouraging your customers to recycle packaging is essential when converting to eco-friendly materials. Motivation is vital when you want to remind customers of this. Please use the suggestions above to ensure your customers recycle your product packaging after purchasing.