The unglamorous problem of void fill
Dunnage — the material that fills the empty space around a product so it does not rattle around in transit — is easy to overlook. It is also where a lot of otherwise-sustainable operations quietly keep buying plastic.
Expanded foam peanuts and air pillows are cheap, light and effective, which is exactly why they persist. But they are also made new, from plastic, for a single trip to the bin. We think there is a better default.
What upcycled dunnage is
When a box reaches the end of its shipping life but is still perfectly good fiber, we do not send it straight to a bale. We turn it into protection: shredded corrugated for cushioning, folded pads for layering, and wound void-fill for filling gaps.
It is the last productive job a piece of board does before recycling — a genuine final loop rather than a landfill or an immediate re-pulp.
How they compare on protection
For the weight class most e-commerce and B2B parcels actually fall into, shredded and pad dunnage cushions comparably to loose-fill foam. It absorbs shock, immobilizes the product and fills voids just fine.
Foam and inflatable pillows still have an edge for the extremes — very heavy items, delicate electronics with precise cavities, or anything needing engineered drop performance. For those, we would not pretend otherwise. But those are the minority of shipments.
Where corrugated pulls ahead
There is also a brand dimension. A customer who opens a box full of plastic foam gets a small, silent message. A customer who opens a box protected with paper dunnage gets a different one.
- Curbside recyclable in the same stream as the box itself — no separate disposal.
- Compostable, unlike expanded plastic foam.
- Made from board already in circulation, not new plastic.
- No static cling, no scattering peanuts, no landfill guilt for your customer.
“The best packaging is the kind your customer can recycle without thinking about it.”
Making the switch
Most operations can move the bulk of their void fill to upcycled corrugated and keep foam only for the handful of SKUs that genuinely need it. That single change removes a surprising amount of single-use plastic from the outbound dock.
If you want to test it, start with your most common parcel size and run a batch. The protection usually holds up better than people expect — and the disposal story is far simpler for everyone downstream.