A team of researchers from Lancaster University are working to help reduce packaging waste through the development of an innovative new computer programme.

The Optimising Packaging for eCommerce Businesses project comes as the United Kingdom has a growing impetus towards reducing packaging through the new Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations. These require businesses to report data on how much packaging they use, and to pay associated waste management fees.

The research team have received more than £50,000 in funding from the UKRI ESRC/AHRC SHAPE Catalyst through the ARC Accelerator for the project. It is one of 16 projects across the UK to be funded by the scheme – and one of two at Lancaster – with the aim to turn idea into sustainable business models.

The project aims to create an accessible web-based graphical user interface (GUI) that will allow businesses to reduce to the costs associated with packaging, including direct costs from packaging materials and the EPR-related fees.

Project lead Dr Jamie Fairbrother, a Lecturer in Operational Research in the Department of Management Science, said: “Packaging is necessary for the protection and transportation of products. But excessive packaging increases both material and transportation costs and has a negative impact on the environment. It is important to minimise packaging as far as possible.

“The challenge is particularly important for eCommerce businesses, which use large amounts of cardboard packaging to dispatch thousands of orders each day.

“Such businesses usually only have a limited number of boxes available to dispatch orders. This selection must be carefully chosen to contain boxes large enough to pack most orders, but also smaller boxes for packing efficiency.

“What makes the problem particularly complex is the large range of possible orders from hundreds or even thousands of different products.”

“As a School and as a University, Lancaster wants to achieve practical impact in our work that goes beyond theory and scholarship – this project is an example of how we can make that happen,” said Stephen King, Partnership Development Manager in Lancaster University Management School.

“The ARC Accelerator is not a traditional source of funding for us in the Management School, but it demonstrates how we can diversify our engagement with funding bodies to achieve positive results for our researchers and for external organisations.”

Previous research in Lancaster resulted in the development of a mathematical optimisation framework which can optimise the selection of boxes for dispatch. It analyses which boxes can be used to pack each order and selects the subset of boxes to optimise packing efficiency.

This existing framework has been implemented as a software tool and demonstrated to produce significant improvements for several real-world data sets. However, it requires a high level of technical expertise to set up and use, and a relatively high amount of computing power to run.

“The aim of our project is to create GUI that will lower the technical barriers and will be usable from any computer with internet access,” said Dr Fairbrother.

“It will open the box optimisation tool to a larger range of users. For example, it could be used to investigate the effect of allowing different numbers of boxes to be used for dispatch, and solutions can be customised according to key performance indicators. It will serve as an effective decision support tool for optimising packaging options.

“Ultimately, this work will benefit the environment by reducing the total amount of packaging being used.”