The Unboxing Problem: How Campuses Are Tackling the Surge in Delivery Packaging Waste

A facilities manager recently posed a question that resonates with sustainability teams at universities across North America: how do we manage the growing flood of cardboard, plastic mailers, air pillows, and bubble wrap arriving with every Amazon, UPS, and FedEx delivery? The short answer: there’s no single solution — but a growing number of campuses have assembled operational and behavioral strategies that are making a real difference.

E-commerce on campus was already climbing before 2020. Post-pandemic, it accelerated sharply. Freshman enrollment in the U.S. rose by roughly 5.5% in fall 2024, adding approximately 130,000 new students — most of them accustomed to daily online ordering. Gen Z consumers shop online at rates that would have seemed extreme a decade ago, and that behavior doesn’t pause when they move into a residence hall.

The numbers bear this out at scale. Stanford University received approximately 420,000 student packages in 2023. By 2024, that figure had climbed to around 450,000 — and that excluded a significant portion of graduate student deliveries. The cardboard waste alone from those packages reached 715 tons in 2024, up from 610 tons the year before. Managing and recycling that cardboard cost Stanford approximately $360,000 in a single year. More than 200 delivery trucks were arriving on campus every week.

Stanford’s experience is not an outlier — it’s a preview of where most campuses are heading. The question sustainability and facilities managers everywhere are asking is the right one. Here is what institutions across the country are doing in response, organized around the four areas where action is having the most impact.

1. The Operational Foundation: Infrastructure for Each Material Stream

Centralized collection · Stream separation · Tracking

The first and most foundational challenge with delivery packaging waste is that it is not one waste stream — it is several, each with different handling requirements, different hauler acceptance rules, and different contamination risks. Treating them as a single “packaging” category is where many programs run into trouble.

Cardboard: High Volume, Manageable — With the Right Infrastructure

Corrugated cardboard is the highest-volume packaging material on most campuses and the most straightforward to handle — provided the right infrastructure is in place. The critical requirements are flattening stations at or near delivery points (to manage volume), dedicated cardboard dumpsters or balers distributed across campus (particularly near residence halls, mailrooms, and loading docks), and clear signage directing occupants to flatten and deposit boxes immediately rather than accumulating them in hallways or offices.

The University of Texas at Dallas built on this principle by creating dedicated cardboard collection pens strategically placed throughout housing locations during move-in season each August — one of the highest-volume packaging periods on any campus. Their 2017 move-in collected 7,000 lbs of cardboard in a single period. The University of Minnesota found that centralized collection for recycling — bringing people to well-positioned stations rather than relying on dispersed desk-side bins — can yield up to 80% recycling rates for targeted material streams like cardboard.

Stanford’s most significant operational shift was moving all student package processing to a centralized facility, with Stanford-owned vehicles completing the last-mile delivery to campus. This consolidation is expected to reduce delivery-related CO₂ emissions by 24% based on distance reductions alone, and creates a single point where packaging materials can be captured at volume before they disperse across the campus.

Plastic Film, Air Pillows, and Poly Mailers: The Trickiest Stream

Plastic film — including bubble wrap, air pillows, shrink wrap, and poly mailers — is the most operationally complex delivery packaging stream. It cannot go into single-stream recycling bins: the material jams sorting equipment at Materials Recovery Facilities and, in many municipalities, triggers fines for the institution if found in commingled recycling. Yet it arrives with virtually every package.

Multiple campuses have solved this by establishing dedicated plastic film drop-off programs — partnering with specialty recyclers that accept clean, dry plastic film and convert it into new products like composite building materials. Tufts University was among the early adopters of this model, and it has since spread widely. The University of Nevada, Reno launched a dedicated plastic film program in early 2026, placing collection bins at the student union and key academic buildings. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee rolled out plastic film drop-off locations in all university housing residence halls in fall 2025, alongside locations in the sustainability office and student union. The University of Washington accepts plastic film through a self-service program with collection points across campus.

The consistent lesson across these programs: placement matters as much as existence. Plastic film bins perform best when positioned in high-traffic student areas — residence hall lobbies, student unions, and near mailroom pickup points — not tucked into sustainability offices alone.

Tracking Volumes and Costs: The Missing Piece for Most Programs

Most campuses cannot answer a basic question: how much packaging waste are we generating and what does it cost us? Stanford’s sustainability research team had to build their own methodology from scratch to quantify the 715-ton cardboard figure and the $360,000 annual cost — neither number was being tracked as a line item. Without this data, it is nearly impossible to build a business case for investment in infrastructure or make the case to procurement and housing for policy changes.

Recommended starting points include: requesting monthly tonnage reports from your waste hauler broken down by material type; working with mailroom or package management services to track package volume trends; and conducting a targeted waste audit of high-delivery-volume zones (mailrooms, residence hall lobbies, loading docks) to establish a baseline. Even rough volume data is vastly more useful than no data when engaging other departments in solutions.

2. Working Upstream: Procurement, Vendors, and Order Consolidation

Sustainable procurement · Vendor standards · Departmental policy

Managing packaging waste downstream — collecting, sorting, hauling — is necessary but not sufficient. The most cost-effective and environmentally impactful intervention happens before packaging arrives on campus at all. That means engaging procurement, working with preferred vendors, and establishing purchasing policies that reduce packaging at the source.

Sustainable Procurement Policies

The University of California system established one of the most comprehensive sustainable procurement frameworks in higher education, requiring that all packaging procured for university use be “designed, produced, and distributed to the end user in a sustainable manner.” Their policy sets measurable spend targets — 100% compliance with minimum green criteria and 25% preferred-level green spend per product category — and evaluates vendors on packaging criteria as part of competitive solicitation.

The University of Michigan’s Marketsite+ catalog system is another model worth examining: it allows staff to order from multiple suppliers through a single consolidated interface, and filters for products with “minimal or eco-responsible packaging” as a searchable attribute. The University of Pittsburgh’s sustainable purchasing guidelines go further, specifying that shipments should be consolidated (several small orders into one larger order), air shipments avoided, and packaging materials made of recycled or recyclable content — requirements embedded in their procurement guidance rather than left as aspirational goals.

Boston University has worked directly with suppliers like WB Mason to develop greener delivery fleet practices and consolidated delivery schedules — recognizing that reducing the frequency of deliveries also reduces the volume of packaging arriving on campus per week.

Departmental Purchasing Practices

One of the most overlooked levers is working with departments to change day-to-day purchasing habits. Common high-impact guidance includes:

• →Consolidate multiple small orders into single weekly or bi-weekly orders per department
• →Purchase in multi-packs and bulk quantities where storage allows, rather than singles or small units
• →Prioritize vendors who offer reduced, minimal, or returnable packaging options
• →Default to local procurement where available — reducing shipping packaging and transportation emissions simultaneously
• →Check campus surplus and reuse channels before purchasing new goods (furniture, equipment, lab supplies)

UC Santa Barbara’s procurement guidance puts it simply: “Consolidate Orders: grouping orders reduces packaging waste and minimizes transportation emissions.” It seems obvious — but without formal guidance embedded in purchasing workflows, individual orderers will default to convenience over consolidation every time.

3. Education and Behavior Change: Getting Students, Faculty, and Staff to Think Differently

Awareness campaigns · Peer influence · Behavior nudges

Infrastructure and policy only go so far. The sheer volume of delivery packaging on campus is ultimately a product of individual purchasing behavior, and shifting that behavior requires intentional, sustained communication — not a single email at the start of the semester.

Make the Scale Visible

One of the most effective behavior-change approaches on campuses is simply showing people what they can’t see. Stanford’s sustainability research team described package waste as equivalent to the weight of 173 adult elephants. Becca Prentice, a Stanford PhD student involved in the research, captured the reaction well: “I totally get how convenient online shopping is, but when you see the amount of waste from the packaging it makes you wonder — are there ways we can be more sustainable?”

Giving the abstract a physical or visual reference — tons of cardboard, number of trucks, equivalent carbon emissions — is consistently more effective at shifting attitudes than purely statistical communication. This content works well in orientation programming, residence hall communications, and sustainability-office social channels.

Cornell’s “Beyond Waste” Model: Practical, Positive, and Actionable

Cornell University’s Beyond Waste Campaign offers one of the most directly applicable frameworks for addressing delivery packaging specifically. The campaign targets student purchasing behavior with concrete, low-friction alternatives: check if essential items are available locally (with information on nearby stores and same-day pickup options), consolidate shipments with a single click on most e-commerce platforms, and properly dispose of packaging materials within the residential community’s recycling areas.

Crucially, Cornell’s approach is not moralistic — it doesn’t ask students to stop shopping online. It asks them to shop a little more thoughtfully and to handle packaging materials correctly. This distinction matters enormously for student engagement: sustainable behavior campaigns that avoid judgment and emphasize ease tend to achieve higher participation rates than those that lead with environmental guilt.

Embedding Education at Key Moments

The moments when students are most receptive to packaging education tend to be at the point of disposal, and at seasonal high-volume moments — particularly move-in. Stanford’s Zero Waste program explicitly notes that “move-in season leads to a noticeable surge in packaging waste, especially cardboard and shipping materials,” and front-loads sustainability orientation during that window.

UT Dallas organizes special cardboard recycling events during August move-in every year, with volunteer spotters at collection stations and organized sorting support. The University of Wisconsin-Madison runs a Sustainable Move-In program that diverts over 50,000 pounds of new resident waste during the first weeks of the year. These high-visibility seasonal moments build habits that carry through the rest of the academic year.

Beyond move-in, peer-to-peer channels are consistently more effective than top-down institutional messaging. UW-Milwaukee directs students to follow specific sustainability Instagram accounts for packaging tips and updates. Macalester College found that dorm-floor recycling competitions — with tangible rewards like a pizza party for the floor with the best sorting accuracy — doubled recycling accuracy rates over ten weeks. Where Green Teams or Eco-Reps exist, they should be specifically briefed on packaging materials and equipped to address questions about plastic film, air pillows, and poly mailers.

4. Cross-Campus Partnerships: Who Needs to Be at the Table

Mailroom · Housing · Procurement · Student groups · Facilities

Delivery packaging waste is one of the clearest examples of a problem that no single department can solve alone. Sustainability offices often own the issue operationally, but the highest-leverage interventions require collaboration across mailroom services, housing, facilities, procurement, and student organizations. Campuses that have made the most progress tend to have formal, ongoing coordination across these groups — not ad-hoc conversations.

Mailroom and Package Services

Package and mailroom teams hold critical data — volume trends, peak periods, carrier breakdowns — that sustainability offices rarely have direct access to. A formal data-sharing agreement between mailroom services and the sustainability team is one of the highest-value, lowest-cost partnerships a campus can establish. Stanford’s 2024 research project noted that collaboration across teams was explicitly key to their ability to quantify the problem and build the case for systemic changes to their delivery model.

University Housing

Residence halls are where the majority of student delivery packaging is generated, which makes housing a critical partner in both infrastructure deployment and behavioral programming. The most effective campus plastic film recycling programs have housing-based collection as a core component — bins in residence hall lobbies rather than requiring students to travel to a central sustainability location. UWM places film recycling bins in all housing residence halls; UW-Madison collects plastic bags at every housing hall desk. Housing can also embed packaging disposal guidance in move-in orientation materials, floor programming, and resident advisor training.

Procurement and Finance

Procurement’s ability to set vendor standards, build packaging criteria into competitive solicitations, and establish consolidated ordering platforms is unmatched by any other campus department. Sustainability offices typically have the environmental expertise; procurement has the contractual leverage. Where these two teams work together — as in the UC system’s sustainable procurement policy framework — the results are system-wide and durable, not dependent on individual behavior.

Student Organizations and Sustainability Councils

Student groups bring credibility, reach, and energy to packaging campaigns that institutional communications alone can’t generate. At the University of Nevada, Reno, the plastic film recycling program gained traction with minimal promotion — suggesting that when infrastructure is in place, peer networks do much of the communication work. Programs like Campus Race to Zero Waste engage student teams in competitive waste reduction efforts that explicitly target packaging streams. Eco-Rep programs at institutions like UT Dallas generate peer educator revenue (through material sales) that directly funds student sustainability initiatives — a model that aligns financial and environmental incentives.

Where to Start: A Practical Sequence for Facilities Managers

If you’re aware of the problem, wanting to act, but unsure where to start — here is the sequence that most successful campus programs have followed:

Delivery packaging waste is genuinely one of the most complex sustainability challenges higher education faces right now — because it sits at the intersection of individual behavior, institutional operations, procurement policy, and infrastructure design. There is no single program that solves it. But as Stanford, Cornell, UW-Madison, Tufts, and dozens of other campuses have demonstrated, sustained progress is absolutely achievable when the right partners are at the table, the right infrastructure is in place, and communication is grounded in what people can see and do.

This is a question more facilities and sustainability managers should be asking openly. The more campuses share what’s working — and what isn’t — the faster the whole sector moves forward.