Industry
How Amazon and DHL Cut Packaging Waste
Big challenges, bigger rewards — what the two companies that actually publish their numbers did about packing optimization.
By Dennis Mosch · · Updated 9 September 2026 · 6 min read
In short
- DHL measured 24% empty space in the average shipping container, and up to 40% air in some e-commerce parcels.
- Amazon's packaging optimization technology cut North American cardboard use by 7–10%, about 60,000 tons a year.
- Both solved it the same way: algorithmic packing decisions at scale, instead of human judgement per shipment.
- Almost nobody else can afford to build that in-house — which is precisely why the capability is now available as an API.
Packing efficiency is one of the few logistics problems where the cost is enormous, the fix is well understood, and almost nobody measures it. Shipping air is expensive in freight, in warehouse volume, in corrugated and in damage — and none of it shows up as a line item on any invoice.
Two companies have published hard numbers on the problem and on what they did about it: Amazon and DHL. Their scale is not yours, but their findings and their conclusions are unusually transferable.
A Common Challenge
The problem is the same everywhere goods move: space inside a box, a pallet or a container goes unused, and that inefficiency propagates through the whole chain.
- Higher shipping costs per unit
- Wasted storage and yard space
- More packaging material than the product needs
- Lower overall supply chain efficiency
It is no accident that the largest logistics operations in the world have spent serious engineering effort on packing optimization and packaging reduction.
Amazon
Amazon sells hundreds of millions of distinct products and ships billions of items a year. To ship with minimal packaging, at speed, and still have the order arrive undamaged, it has to innovate at a scale where manual inspection of each item is simply not an option.
Four constraints, all at once:
- Minimal packaging
- Maximum speed
- Minimum shipment damage, and so minimum returns
- A scalable solution, with no manual inspections
Reducing packaging waste is an important part of Amazon's goal to become a more sustainable company, but choosing the most efficient, optimal amount of packaging that both reduces waste and protects products can be challenging.
DHL
Packaging density optimization is an industry-wide challenge. 24% of the volume of the average shipping container is empty space. In some e-commerce categories, parcels contain up to 40% air.
Those figures come from DHL's Rethinking Packaging research, which sets out their view of the future of packaging in logistics. They are worth sitting with for a moment: roughly a quarter of everything moving through global container freight is nothing at all.
The problem is hard precisely because supply chains are fast. Every shipment is different, and staff have seconds — not minutes — to decide how to pack it.
Integrate Packing Optimizer into your IT environment to instantly access a range of advanced packing algorithms that drive business success.
What They Did, and What It Returned
Amazon built its own packaging optimization system, letting it analyse and reduce packaging algorithmically rather than by inspection. That was a sensible build decision for Amazon specifically: it has the data, the engineers and the volume to amortise the investment.
In North America, applying PackOpt [packaging optimization] technology has resulted in an annual reduction in cardboard waste of 7% to 10%, saving roughly 60,000 tons of cardboard annually.
That approach lines up exactly with where DHL's research says the industry is heading. Their four predicted packaging innovations:
- Much greater use of data and analytics to support packaging decisions, better balancing the trade-offs between product protection, usability and resource consumption.
- Greater automation at every stage of the packaging lifecycle.
- A significant increase in closed-loop and circular packaging concepts.
- Sustainable alternatives to plastic.
Unsurprisingly, DHL built something similar to Amazon's system. OptiCarton is their algorithmic optimization tool for streamlining warehouse operations and reducing packaging.
The Part That Applies to Everyone Else
Here is the honest reading of these two case studies. Both companies concluded that packing decisions have to be made by an algorithm rather than a person, and both then spent years and substantial engineering budgets building that algorithm in-house.
That second half is not reproducible for most businesses, and it is the reason the problem stayed unsolved outside the top tier for so long. A packing optimizer is a genuinely hard piece of software to write, and it produces no value until it is finished and integrated.
What has changed is that the capability no longer has to be built. The same class of algorithm is available as an API that drops into an existing WMS, ERP or order flow — which turns a multi-year engineering programme into an integration task, and puts Amazon-grade packing decisions within reach of operations several orders of magnitude smaller.
The size of the prize scales down with you, but the percentage does not. If a quarter of your container volume is air, that is true whether you ship ten containers a year or ten thousand.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much empty space is in a typical shipment?
DHL's research puts it at 24% of the volume of the average shipping container, rising to as much as 40% air in some e-commerce parcel categories. Your own figure is worth measuring rather than assuming — it varies enormously by product mix and box assortment.
How much does packaging optimization actually save?
Amazon reports a 7–10% annual reduction in cardboard waste in North America from its packaging optimization technology, roughly 60,000 tons a year. Material is only part of it: fewer, better-filled shipments also reduce freight spend, storage volume and transit damage.
Do we need to build our own packing optimization software?
Almost certainly not. Amazon and DHL built theirs because they had the scale to justify it and no mature third-party option at the time. Today the same algorithms are available as APIs, so the work is integration rather than research — weeks instead of years.
Is packing optimization only worth it at large scale?
The absolute saving scales with volume, but the inefficiency is proportional. A mid-sized shipper running 25% empty space is wasting the same share of freight spend as a large one. The practical threshold is not company size but whether you ship enough that a percentage of freight cost is a number worth chasing.
Find out what your own number is.
Every packing calculation we return includes volume utilisation per bin and across the shipment. Run one real order through it and you will know within minutes whether this is worth your time.
Have any questions?
Tell us about your packing problem and we will come back to you, usually the same day.