The era of e-commerce has brought choice, convenience and cardboard boxes. Oh, lots of cardboard boxes.
“Everything is packaged these days,” said Chantal Emmanuel, co-founder and chief technology officer at the company. LimelopWhich is a participant in TechCrunch’s 2023 Battlefield 200 startup competition.
For many consumers, seeing so much waste can be distressing. For retailers and fulfillment companies, single-use packaging is a huge blow to both their bottom lines and their sustainability outcomes.
Emanuel and Ashley Etling, LimeLoop’s other co-founder and CEO, had previously worked together at an industrial design company that shipped samples in reusable packaging. Years later, Etling found one of those packages in a cardboard box containing all the items.
At the same time, e-commerce was taking off in the United States. “Both of us shop online more than we’d like to admit,” Emanuel said, and we both had a surplus of single-use cardboard boxes. Ettling contacted Emanuel, and the two began brainstorming what a company built around reusable packaging might look like.
Turns out the answer was more than just reusable mailers. Hardware and software became a key part of the business model, allowing LimeLoop to track their mail as they made their way from origin to destination. This is useful not only for e-commerce, but also for hospital systems, for example, which may need to guarantee delivery at a certain time.
LimeLoop mailers are made from recycled plastics and contain LoRaWAN modules that allow them to be tracked using the Helium Network and Amazon’s Sidewalk network. “This is what gives us real-time data across most of the United States and the world,” Emanuel said.
A startup has two basic types of packages: those that move from businesses to consumers and those that take implementation routes within or between businesses. The latter are larger suitcases that can hold about 40 pounds and have a lifespan of about 50 flights. Consumer-facing packages are smaller and can handle at least 100 trips. In many cases, the packaging is still structurally sound, but is too large to be useful, Emanuel said.
As a result, mailers’ carbon footprint is approximately 90% lower than that of cardboard, even when taking into account return shipping. On the consumer side, this happens through the US Postal Service, which picks up mailers when the mail carrier makes its regular rounds. On the B2B side, the bags can be folded and packed into another bag, 10 at a time, for the return trip.
The company has a number of clients, including sustainable clothing retailer Toad&Co. and outdoor equipment company Topo Designs.
While much of the focus is on the packages themselves, Emanuel said the intelligence of their platform is what made the circularity of their system possible. “We’ve found that’s really vital to what we do because if you don’t know where the packages are, you don’t keep them in circulation; you might as well use cardboard,” she said.