How much packaging do you use per year? Here's how to weigh and record it in an hour
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by Verpakkingdeals.nl
6 min reading time
Most webshops only order boxes and tape when their stock is depleted and don't know how much material they use annually. With a scale and your order history, you can figure that out in an hour.
Ask a small webshop how much turnover they had last year, and the answer will come within ten seconds. Ask how many kilograms of cardboard left the premises, and there will be silence. Packaging material is ordered when the shelf runs empty, not based on data.
That's fine as long as no one asks. But at some point, someone will ask: your accountant when determining your cost price, a supplier offering you a tiered discount, or the organization that manages the packaging waste contribution. Then it's useful to already have the answer. It will take you an hour.
Why weight is more practical than pieces
Most entrepreneurs think in pieces: so many boxes, so many rolls of tape. That works fine for purchasing, but not when you want to add up different materials. A box, a roll of film, and an envelope cannot be added up in pieces; in grams, they can.
Weight is also the unit in which you encounter packaging elsewhere. Carriers charge in kilograms, the waste management contribution is expressed in kilograms per material type, and your own cost price per package only becomes comparable if you know what material is in each shipment.
The third advantage is practical: you can measure weight yourself, in one afternoon, without having to wait for information from a supplier.
The weighing round: what you need and what to do
A kitchen scale is sufficient for boxes and rolls. For light items — a seal, a single envelope, a meter of tape — a finer scale is more useful; a Mini Precision Pocket Scale (€ 12.00) does the job.
Lay out everything you use and weigh one unit per type:
Boxes: weigh one per size, flat and unfolded.
Tape: weigh a full roll and an empty core. The difference divided by the length gives you the weight per meter. For a 50-meter roll, you can then easily calculate per package: how many meters do you use per box?
Film: weigh a piece of exactly one meter across the full roll width. This allows you to convert to the weight per package later.
Envelopes and bags: weigh ten and divide by ten. Single envelopes are too light to weigh reliably.
Small items: seals, stickers, cards. Also by ten.
Note everything in grams in a single table. Twenty lines are enough for most small webshops.
The table you fill in
Material
Type
Unit
Weight per unit
Quantity per year
Mailbox box A6
Paper and cardboard
1 piece
… grams
…
Shipping box 15x15x15 cm
Paper and cardboard
1 piece
… grams
…
Packaging tape
Plastic
1 meter
… grams
…
Bubble wrap
Plastic
1 meter
… grams
…
Bubble envelope
Mixed
1 piece
… grams
…
The "type" column seems superfluous but is precisely the column you will need later. Paper, plastic, and mixed materials are counted separately, and a bubble envelope with a paper exterior and a film layer inside does not simply fall under one of the two.
From grams per package to kilos per year
Now, link the weighing results to your order history. You don't have to count anything: look at your purchase invoices to see how much you ordered last year. Five bundles of one hundred mailbox boxes mean five hundred boxes, regardless of how many are still on the shelf now. Correct at the end for the difference between your beginning inventory and your ending inventory, and you'll be close enough to reality.
Suppose your scale indicates 45 grams for one mailbox box, and you ordered five hundred. That's 22.5 kilos of cardboard from one line. You do the same calculation for each line in your table; at the bottom, you add up by material type. In an hour, you'll have a figure you can use for a year.
For the purchasing side, use the same list. The Recycled Mailbox Box A6 costs €17.95 per bundle of 100, and the A5+ version €24.00 per 100. As soon as you know how much you go through per year, you'll immediately see if a larger purchase makes sense.
Getting your cost price per package accurate. With weight and price per unit in the same table, you can easily calculate what an average shipment costs you in packaging. Even the small items you easily forget count: a VOID security seal (€9.95 for 60 pieces) or a C6 envelope (€4.00 for 50) for the packing slip.
Packaging lighter where possible. If you see that the bulk of your kilograms comes from one box size, you know where there's potential for savings. A bubble envelope of 33 x 23 cm (€0.80) or the 22 x 17 cm (€0.90) size weighs less than a box for the same item — if the product allows it.
Knowing where you stand. In the Netherlands, the packaging waste contribution is managed by Verpact, the organization formerly known as Stichting Afvalfonds Verpakkingen. Whether you need to declare, what the threshold is, and what should be in a packaging administration, you can find on their page Do I need to declare?. Always refer to the official information there; rules change, and this article is not legal advice. What is certain: if you ever need to provide anything, a table with weights per material type is exactly what you need.
Keeping track without it becoming a chore
The pitfall is that you devise a system you can't maintain after three weeks. Therefore, don't count per package. Do this:
Weigh your materials once a year, or only if you switch to a different format or supplier.
Keep your purchase invoices together in one folder. You already do that for your bookkeeping anyway.
Once a year, add up the quantities from those invoices and multiply by your weighing table.
That's all there is to it. As long as your weighing table is accurate, your order history does the rest of the work. A good time to do it is now, just before the busy months: you'll then know exactly which sizes and how many to reorder, instead of guessing.
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