Picture the last parcel you opened. A small thing rattling around inside a box four times too big, cushioned by a tangle of paper or a couple of plastic air pillows. Mildly annoying, easy to forget. Now multiply that single box by the ~200 billion parcels the world ships every year, and the annoyance turns into one of logistics' most expensive — and most invisible — problems.
The packaging giant DS Smith gave it a name: air-commerce. Their research found that the UK alone ships 85 million m³ of air into people's homes every year through oversized packaging — the equivalent of more than 34,000 Olympic swimming pools of nothing, hauled around on diesel lorries. And the UK is just one market.
What's actually inside the box
Here's the uncomfortable bit. When researchers actually measure e-commerce parcels, the average box runs 40–64% empty space. Ask the executives who run those operations and they'll estimate their average void at around 25%. That gap — between what operators think they're shipping and what they're really shipping — is the whole problem in one number.
It isn't laziness or ignorance — it's friction. A packer working to a throughput target doesn't have time to solve a 3D puzzle for every multi-item order. The "right" box is often out of stock, so the next size up gets used. And crucially, no one ever sees the void percentage of what they just shipped, so the waste stays invisible. As the trade press put it in 2026, "shipping air is no longer a minor inefficiency. It is a measurable factor in transport emissions and supply chain performance."
The bill for shipping nothing
Air is free. Moving it is not. DS Smith's UK research alone attributes the following to oversized packaging every single year:
Zoom out to the continent and the scale gets harder to ignore. The EU generated 79.7 million tonnes of packaging waste in 2023, of which 40.4% was paper and cardboard — roughly 32 million tonnes of corrugated waste a year, much of it boxing up air. Every tonne of corrugated cardboard produced carries about 1.2 tonnes of CO₂ with it, so the empty space isn't just material waste — it's avoidable manufacturing emissions baked into every oversized box.
Then there's how carriers charge. Under dimensional-weight (DIM) pricing, you pay for the volume a box occupies, not just what it weighs. An oversized box on every shipment means every shipment is quietly overcharged — and a half-empty parcel burns the same truck fuel as a full one. Industry estimates put the recoverable saving at around €0.50 per box in materials alone. Across 500,000 orders a year, that's a quarter of a million euros evaporating into thin air. Literally.
"Wasted materials are not an accident. Waste happens because of choices made at the design stage… now is the time to design the air out of online shopping."
Stefano Rossi — CEO, DS Smith PackagingCustomers notice — and they don't love it
The waste isn't only environmental and financial; it's reputational. In DS Smith's consumer survey, 46% of shoppers said receiving a box with too much packaging left them frustrated with the retail brand. In an era where unboxing is content and sustainability is a purchase driver, a giant box around a small product is a small but repeated own-goal — multiplied across the 167 million parcels UK shoppers receive every month.
From annoyance to obligation: the PPWR clock
Until recently, void space was a soft problem — bad for margins, bad for optics, easy to defer. The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR, Regulation 2025/40) turns it into a hard one. It entered into force on 11 February 2025, and its headline provisions start applying from 12 August 2026.
The part that matters here is the empty space rule: e-commerce, grouped and transport packaging will be capped at a maximum 50% void. And critically, the regulation counts filler against you — paper cuttings, air cushions, bubble wrap, foam and the rest are treated as empty space, not as product. If it's in the box and it isn't the thing the customer ordered, it's void.
Main PPWR provisions become binding. Packaging-minimisation requirements and technical documentation start to apply.
Sales packaging must be reduced to the "minimum necessary." The European Commission's official empty-space calculation methodology is due.
The 50% empty-space cap applies to grouped, transport and e-commerce packaging (or 36 months after the methodology is published — whichever is later).
Enforcement is delegated to member states, and the early signals aren't gentle: fines reach up to €200,000 per violation in Germany and the Netherlands and €100,000 in France, alongside market-withdrawal orders and customs holds. Any business shipping physical goods into the EU — including non-EU sellers — is in scope.
The catch is that compliance isn't something you can buy off a shelf at the deadline. Demonstrating that your packaging minimises empty space means knowing the dimensional relationship between every SKU and every box in your stock — exactly the data most operators don't have today. Brands that start measuring now have a runway. Brands that wait will be reverse-engineering their box stock under penalty pressure.
Three pressures, one root cause
Cost, carbon and compliance look like three separate problems. They're not — they're three symptoms of the same root cause: boxes that don't fit what's in them.
Margin in the void
DIM surcharges, wasted corrugated and filler, fewer parcels per truck. ~€0.50 recoverable per box — real money at scale.
Emissions you can't report away
Packaging is a major slice of e-commerce emissions. Right-sizing cuts up to ~30% of CO₂ per shipment and 20–30% of cardboard.
The PPWR paper trail
The 50% cap needs documented proof your boxes minimise void — impossible without SKU-to-box data.
The good news: the fix is mostly a maths problem, not a hardware problem. Match the box to the order and the air disappears on its own. Right-sizing has been shown to cut shipping costs by 15–20%, reduce cardboard use by 20–30%, and slash void fill by 60–70%. The barrier was never willingness — it was the fact that no human can solve optimal box selection for mixed-SKU orders, in seconds, on a busy shift.
That's the gap Tetrik is built to close. We use machine learning to cluster your SKUs into the smallest box range that actually fits them, quantify the void you're eliminating, and produce the kind of data PPWR documentation will demand — without slowing your packers down or adding a single machine to the line. In short: we help you stop shipping air.