Myntra Goes Eco-Friendly By Eliminating 100% Single-Use Plastic Packaging

For the ongoing largest ever edition of Big Fashion Festival, being held from October 3 to 10, Myntra has successfully implemented 100% plastic-free packaging in its entire supply chain, adhering to its commitment outlined in August 2019. In addition to its own supply chain, Myntra’s sellers have also adopted the green packaging defined by Myntra. This milestone is a significant outcome of the efforts initiated by Myntra towards aligning its seller partners and helping them with a transition path to gradually adopt sustainable packaging alternatives.

In an industry-first for any fashion and lifestyle e-commerce brand operating at scale in India, Myntra has introduced scalable and sustainable alternatives for packaging and delivery, such as replacing poly pouches with recycled paper bags, bubble wraps with carton waste shredded material and plastic adhesives tapes with paper tapes, polybags used for attaching customer invoices with a recycled Kraft paper pouch and RFID-tagged multi-use polyester bags, piloted for reverse shipments as packaging materials. This move has led to the diversion of 670 tonnes of plastic, as of September 2021.  The pioneering innovations implemented in packaging that eliminate the use of plastic are also in compliance with national and state regulations.

This has been achieved as a result of the commitment of multiple in-house teams and their methodical approach, involving several months of suitable material and process exploration, and collaboration with several ecosystem stakeholders. They included brand partners and sellers in order to ensure that alternative processes and methods being adopted were adept at handling the scale and specific requirements  of the e-commerce supply chain, in addition to being sturdy enough to handle different product categories. In doing so, Myntra also ensured that these solutions were affordable and scalable for seller partners. The project was undertaken with numerous educational webinars and training sessions conducted to help vendor partners implement the new paper packaging system across the country. To facilitate faster adoption of these paper bags in the packaging value chain and to ensure that the sellers get them at a regulated price and optimal quality, Myntra equipped its seller portals to enable sellers to place orders directly for the bags.The journey towards achieving this milestone also included  prototypes of the alternatives being tested for six months to choose the most scalable and affordable systems. Committed to solving for this green milestone also led Myntra to pioneer a solution for adapting existing machines designed and built to run plastic bags only, to now process paper packaging. To ensure 100% adoption, a unique QR code scanning was implemented for each bag to prevent any inadvertent use of plastic bags instead of paper bags. Myntra even went on to ensure that all Fulfillment Centres were equipped with the right technology and adequate infrastructure including machine customisation to carry out the goal of sustainable packaging in entirety.

In this direction, another key initiative by Myntra along with the brand partners, includes, ‘Ecommerce-ready packaging’, which is a sustainable program aimed towards doing away with the need for a secondary layer of packaging in e-commerce shipments permanently and shipping products directly in primary packaging.

Speaking on this milestone achievement, Amar Nagaram, CEO, Myntra, said, “We place strong emphasis on sustainable and responsible business practices and Myntra has been emphatic in its mission of going plastic-free. Packaging offers a visible and tangible indication of our commitment to creating a sustainable ecosystem and moving towards a 100% elimination of single-use plastic is a major step and a significant milestone in the direction of sustainable practices. As a leading player in the fashion, lifestyle and beauty space in the country, we have taken the lead in enabling our seller ecosystem to adopt sustainable packaging alternatives along with us, creating positive environmental impact across the entire supply chain.”

Myntra’s sustainability journey has been marked by an orchestrated effort to create a positive environmental impact. With the goal of going 100% plastic-free with the packaging achieved, Myntra is set to leave a profound mark on the industry. One of the other key earlier initiatives  by Myntra  include partnering with Canopy, a not-for-profit environmental organization, to ensure that the packaging used does not encourage deforestation, by scaling packaging from recycled and alternative materials. Myntra is also the first fashion e-commerce company in the country to partner with the Better Cotton Initiative, the largest cotton sustainability programme globally that aims to make cotton farming sustainable. Last year, Myntra announced that two of its largest fulfilment centres were now solar power enabled.

The opening day of Myntra’s ongoing edition of Big Fashion Festival (BFF) received an overwhelming response with ~19 million visitors from across the country shopping for over  4 million items, making it Myntra’s highest-ever Day 1 of  BFF thus far. With this pioneering green milestone, Myntra will commence the journey of making deliveries to its customers in 100% plastic free sustainable packaging, ringing the festive cheer in a way that is environmentally friendly.