Marin County resident builds effort for Amazon to take back empty delivery boxes

Every week when Carolyn Lund grabs Amazon deliveries from her Belvedere doorstep, she thinks about the headway she’s made in less than two years trying to convince the behemoth to pick up its unpacked boxes for reuse.

“There was a small group of us just talking about this,” said Lund, who sits on the Belvedere Parks and Open Space committee. “But people stepped up and wanted to help.”

The Amazon to Reuse Boxes pilot program officially launched a year ago. Lund started a petition on Change.org with a goal of reaching 10,000 signatures. She’s now on the cusp of 8,000.

“The Bay Area is one of Amazon’s largest markets,” Lund said. “They’re testing a number of things in San Francisco and Oakland. In San Francisco, they’re testing using their delivery trucks as mobile stores … so to ask them to test a product in Marin County seems a reasonable request.”

Lund is retired from a career spent in marketing and launching products for corporations.

“No one has asked Amazon to reuse the boxes,” she said, “and they are all about customer service.”

Lund has the business savvy to know she has to build her case before reaching out directly to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, CEO and president. Nevertheless, she wrote a “Dear Jeff” opinion piece a year ago that was published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

An excerpt from it reads, “Please, pick up our flattened Amazon boxes for reuse. Single-use packaging is greedy. Reuse eliminates handling, transport, remanufacturing and the need for additional natural resources (like timber and water), and causes no pollution. eBay sellers and independent mail services are already shipping products in reused boxes.”

Support for the reuse program is coming from across Marin County in cities and towns that stretch beyond Belvedere to include San Rafael, Larkspur, Fairfax, Mill Valley and Muir Beach.

Lund is also getting the attention of the business community, including one of the county’s largest employers.

Marin Healthcare District unanimously endorsed the Amazon initiative last month at its board meeting.

“I think it was a pretty easy decision to make,” said Dr. Larry Bedard, who chairs the board. “The first part of the discussion was that maybe we could have the employees bring the boxes back to the hospital and we’ll recycle them. Then we thought we’d have to hire a couple of additional people. But that isn’t practical.”

Bedard said he is planning to set up a meeting with the manager of the Amazon 4-star store in Corte Madera, as well as Whole Foods. Amazon bought the grocery chain for $13.7 billion in June 2017.

“I talked to Carolyn about a box-exchange program,” Bedard said, the idea being if Whole Foods is delivering groceries, then its drivers could pick up the unpacked boxes from customers, who would leave them at the curbside.

Lund said the next step is to go before the Board of Supervisors, then to the state Legislature once the program has full community support from residents and businesses.

“The idea would be to introduce a bill in the Legislature,” she said. “The bill doesn’t have to pass, but its function is to make this more important to Amazon.”

Staff Writer Cheryl Sarfaty covers tourism, hospitality, health care and education. Reach her at cheryl.sarfaty@busjrnl.com or 707-521-4259.