Mission Foods finds reusable plastic shipping boxes saves both money and the environment

Recycling and environmental benefits can also come with cost savings if you do it right. When you think of recycling, you usually think of it in terms of piling all of your recyclables such as cardboard, paper, plastic, and metal into a cart or a bin and having it shipped off to the city plant for processing. However, recycling can also mean reusing the same thing many times over, saving not only money, but the environment as well.

A company called Mission Foods noticed that the boxes that they were using to ship its products to the supermarket were cardboard, and thus they could only be used once. Since a cardboard shipping box cost one dollar a copy, the company determined that it was throwing away a dollar on everything they shipped a box. The boxes alone cost Mission Foods $5 million a year.

So the company decided to switch to plastic boxes to ship their products, which are more durable than cardboard boxes and are reusable. Each of the plastic boxes cost seven dollars. That means that after eight uses, plastic boxes were breaking even. Each of the plastic boxes could be reused 25 to 50 times, improving Mission Foods’ bottom line.

As a bonus, the company installed an RFID device on each of the plastic boxes. Thus, Mission Foods was able to track their packages in real time, improving warehouse management. Mission Foods won the 2011 RFID Journal Award Winner: RFID Green Award for this particular innovation. It is a great example of how a company can do well by doing good.

After the plastic boxes reach the end of their useful life, they can be sent to a recycling facility, thus creating further environmental benefits; conserving natural resources.