Improving Packaging: The Cost of Shipping Air is Going Up

Retailers and manufactureres that insist on using inefficient and sloppy packaging methods—oversized boxes, inefficient packaging, poorly constructed palletized contents—are paying for their mistakes in sharply higher freight rates.

Carriers say inefficient packaging is terribly wasteful. It wastes trees to make excess cardboard for packages that are too big for products being transported. It wastes space on trailers in an era when trucking capacity is stagnant. And it wastes fuel for extra trucks to move those excessively large packages.

Due to the driver shortage, the growth in e-commerce traffic, as well as the rise in bulky lightweight freight, carriers say that they’re “cubing out” their trucks before coming even close to reaching full weight capacity—and they’re reacting to these market place changes.