Sharing insights from our ongoing journey to create more sustainable product packaging

By David Bourne, Sustainability Strategy Lead, Google Consumer Hardware
Miguel Arevalo, Packaging Innovation Lead, Google Consumer Hardware

Creating long-term sustainability in products and services is an enormous challenge requiring dedication and expertise across a wide range of disciplines. As we imagine a sustainable future, it’s clear that companies will need to integrate many different solutions, but it’s also true that no one company can create them all. It’s normal for companies to adopt best practices from others over time, but where sustainability is concerned, the speed of that adoption matters. Time is of the essence for our planet. To accelerate progress in sustainability, we want to share more than simply what we’ve achieved, but also how we’ve achieved it to enable others in their sustainability journey. Today, we’re sharing our packaging insights, but we’ll continue doing this in other areas and also hope to learn from others as they do the same.

Our journey to create more sustainable packaging has necessitated a focus on many different improvement opportunities. We initially concentrated on lowering our overall packaging weight and volume and made significant progress in reducing both by over 50% from our first Pixel phone to Pixel 8.¹ However, even with reductions in these metrics, packaging materials across all industries represent a significant portion of municipal solid waste streams.² Because of this, it’s critical to optimize packaging designs for recyclability. We’ve been steadily reducing our use of plastic packaging to ease recyclability for municipalities and waste management systems. Plastic isn’t inherently problematic, but its overuse in packaging, particularly in mixed material formats, makes recycling and resource recovery a challenge. Diverse plastic types and inconsistent quality further exacerbate this issue. Pixel 8 was our first product designed with 100% plastic-free packaging³ aligning to our commitment to eliminate plastic from our hardware product packaging by 2025.

“Design is about solving problems and sustainability is one of the biggest problems of our time, so I am encouraged by our progress and continued commitment to finding better solutions to meet our planet’s challenges.”
- Ivy Ross, VP Design, UX and Research, Google Consumer Hardware

As we’ve worked toward fulfilling this commitment across our consumer hardware portfolio, we saw an opportunity to create a larger impact by sharing what we’ve learned so far. Our Plastic-Free Packaging Design Guide contains insights we’ve gained from our design, engineering, and operations efforts in creating more sustainable packaging for our hardware devices. We hope our design suggestions will accelerate progress for others with similar sustainability ambitions. Beyond that, we hope it inspires other companies to share knowledge and best practices they’ve developed across a wide range of sustainability topics.

“A sustainable future won’t be achieved through the actions of one company. Working together is always how the best outcomes are realized.”
- Ana Corrales, Chief Operating Officer, Google Consumer Hardware

We believe that innovation in sustainability should be a collaborative endeavor to benefit all, not a competitive one. Together, we can move faster toward our collective sustainability goals than we would independently. Our Plastic-Free Packaging Design Guide is one of our first publications that shares technical details from our consumer hardware sustainability work, but it’s rooted in Google’s long-standing mission. As we develop other sustainable solutions for our products going forward, we hope to share more and foster a culture of optimism and progress through collaboration

Our solutions aren’t perfect, but we think they represent a helpful step forward. We aim to update the guide as we develop new solutions and encourage others to expand those solutions for everyone’s benefit. We welcome feedback on the types of information that would be most helpful to others as well as ideas on how we can make these kinds of publications even more useful. Let’s accelerate sustainability together.

g.co/hardware/PackagingGuide
packaging_sustainability@google.com