Google will ditch plastic packaging by 2025, announces further sustainability efforts

Ben Schoon | Oct 26 2020 - 10:00 am PT

As environmental issues continue to cause more and more issues on this planet, some tech companies have been making a point of improving sustainability efforts. Google has big plans as a company for the next few years, and today, the hardware division is announcing its own goals including completely eliminating plastic packaging.

Google hardware has already ditched a lot of plastic. Since the original Pixel back in 2016, the company has used mostly cardboard for its Pixel packaging, but to this day, there’s still a fair amount of single-use plastic in these boxes. That includes the phone’s protective covering, the little clips the hold cables together, and plastic on the outside of the box, too.

Today, the company has announced plans to completely ditch plastic in its hardware packaging by the year 2025. By that point, packaging will be 100% plastic-free and 100% recyclable.

We’ll continue to keep all shipping of Made by Google hardware to and from our direct customers 100 percent carbon neutral. And we want to take things a step further by ensuring that the product box itself is sustainable and recyclable, removing headaches for the recyclers who process it. So by 2025, we’re committing to making our product packaging 100 percent plastic free and 100 percent recyclable. We’ve already made a reduction in plastic use in our packaging since 2016, but we have a lot of hard work ahead in order to meet this new goal. To get us there, we need to uncover alternative, recyclable materials that will still protect our products. It’ll take partnering with our suppliers, tinkering in the lab and sharing learnings across the industry, but we’ll get there.

Those aren’t Google’s only plans to improve the sustainability of its hardware, though. As you may know, many of Google’s products use recycled materials. Speakers such as Nest Mini and Nest Audio have “fabric” created from recycled plastics. Google’s fabric cases for its phones also incorporate a similar material. The new Chromecast is also made from nearly 50% recycled plastic.

Also by 2025, Google plans to by using recycled or renewable materials in at least 50% of plastics used in its hardware products.

In the shorter term, Google says that all final assembly manufacturing sites will achieve a UL 2799 Zero Waste to Landfill certification by 2022 by ensuring that the “vast majority” of waste from the manufacturing process is recycled instead of ending up in a landfill.