The Wally Shop: How Getting Groceries Delivered Can Mean Going Green

It started with almond milk.

Tamara Lim was making her own, having found out that most on the market only contain two fragments of the nut. Wouldn’t it be cool, she thought, if someone created a brand with more elements? It would be more expensive, but costs could be offset through reusable packaging.

The recent college grad couldn’t stop thinking about packaging because it was her job to do so. At the time, Lim lived in Seattle and worked for Amazon, where she managed the mega-corporation’s packaging processes. Through her work she noticed a trend across sects of the business: consumers began demanding eco-friendly packaging, such as thinner, recyclable cardboard.

“If you think back to the milkmen days, the reason why we used to reuse bottles was because of economical reasons”

For a retailer shipping millions of products around the world each day, product supply can be inconsistent. Lim’s job was to solve that problem for vendors; to facilitate transitions as they reconsidered packaging products that she and the customer knew were contributing, overall, to a wide-spread global waste crisis — “a problem that impacts every single person on this planet,” she tells Supermaker.