Kraft and corrugated boxes printed with soy or water-based inks and sized to your product, so there’s less filler and less board in every order. Most are curbside recyclable. Mailers, tuck end cartons and shipping boxes, with free dieline setup and free ground shipping in the USA.
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Plenty of packaging gets called eco friendly just because it’s brown. That’s not really enough. Eco-friendly kraft boxes start with recyclable kraft or corrugated board, use soy or water-based inks, skip plastic where they can, and are sized so you’re not shipping air and a pile of filler along with your product.
Who asks? Candle makers, soap people, coffee roasters, a lot of clothing and skincare brands, basically anyone whose customer actually flips the box over and reads the bottom, and what they want is a box that backs up what’s on their About page without feeling flimsy or doubling the packaging bill.
Kraft paperboard is the go-to for retail cartons. It’s unbleached, with that brown, slightly textured surface, and it folds into tuck end boxes, sleeves and small cartons. Corrugated is the shipping version, with E-flute for mailer boxes and B-flute for heavier orders. Most corrugated and kraft boxes can go straight into a curbside recycling bin.
Kraft prints a bit funny. The brown shows through every color you put on it, so your nice bright yellow turns kind of mustardy, and a true white needs a white ink layer underneath it first. We’d usually talk people out of full photos here. Black or a deep green on kraft? Looks great. The kraft paper guide explains why.
The greenest box is often just the smaller one. Fit the carton to the product and you use less board and less void fill, the outer case shrinks, freight gets lighter. So we measure your product (or you do, and send us the numbers) and draw the dieline around it instead of grabbing the closest stock size and jamming crumpled paper in the gap.
Jars and bottles in foam trays? A folded paperboard insert can usually take over that job. In most cases they hold the product just as well, and they go in the same recycling bin as the box. Fewer materials in one package also makes life easier for the customer, who doesn’t have to separate anything before recycling.
Here’s the catch with finishes. Plastic lamination and glitter (and some metallic foils too) make the box a pain to recycle, so if that’s the whole reason you’re buying, we’d leave the board bare and get your texture from embossing or debossing. A debossed logo on kraft looks simple and quiet, which is usually what these brands are after anyway. Nope, it doesn’t look cheap. Done well, it looks deliberate.
If you do want some color, keep it to one or two inks and let the board show through. Custom eco friendly packaging boxes with lots of empty kraft space tend to look more honest than ones flooded edge to edge with print.
See the eco-friendly boxes range for styles, all our kraft boxes in one place, or kraft corrugated boxes for shipping. You can ask for a quote on our contact page.
Not automatically. Strength comes from board thickness and flute, not color, so a kraft carton and a white one of the same weight perform about the same.
Yes, though colors print darker on kraft. Need the colors to really pop? Go with white corrugated, still printed in soy or water-based inks.
A little, sometimes. Kraft and corrugated are everyday stuff for us, though, and the smaller box tends to cut your postage enough that it washes out.
Brands ordering these often look at custom tray and sleeve packaging boxes and window tie boxes as well. You can see the full range in eco-friendly boxes.
