Yes, it costs a bit more, but we'd rather cut into our profit than cut down more trees. 

Since there's no better time than Earth Day to unveil your product's sustainable packaging, here's the story of our design! First, during the design process, we found that most baby product packaging ends up in landfills because it's only semi-recyclable.  We knew we had to get creative and find a better solution.

So, we chose to use only kraft boxes for all Mason Bottle products. In addition to looking lovely, kraft boxes have a) the lowest carbon footprint of any material we could find, b) are easier to recycle than the standard white boxes most brands use, and c) don't require bleaching. 

 

What Not To Do
Most other baby brands sell their bottles in white boxes, and we've already pointed out the downsides to that. But an even bigger problem is the way accessories like extra nipples are packaged. Most are sold in blister cards: those plastic windows backed by cardstock like this drawing below.
 

They’re commonly used for many kinds of baby products, as well as not-at-all-baby-friendly items, you know, like pens, razors, batteries, etc... The thing about blister cards is that they’re not recyclable in the majority of US cities. Turns out gluing the plastic part to the cardstock part marries the materials in a way that’s difficult to separate back out. That’s why we decided to package all of Mason Bottle’s products in kraft boxes that are 100% recyclable.

What’s Yet To Do
Are there any environmental goals we didn’t meet with our packaging? For sure. We had originally tried to use 100% recycled fiber for our boxes. Unfortunately, these boxes absorbed the ink in a weird and non-legible way. We were disappointed, but learned a valuable lesson for designing future products!

But you know what would be even better than 100% recycled packaging? Next-to-no-packaging! What if we could eliminate the box altogether and just do a tiny tag or wrap? The minimalist look would absolutely be the Earth’s favorite! We’re working on it.