saddle packaging Plastic Elimination
Our Saddle packaging consists of a chip board card with rail shaped holes and a zip tie to hold them tightly in place. Trek tasked the packaging team to eliminate 100% of plastic from our packaging by 2024, so I designed a paper insert to hold the rails in place. By replacing the zip tie with a locking paper insert, we eliminate 150kg of plastic per year - roughly 150,000 zip ties.
First Try
This version uses a corrugated card that creases at the bottom to form a cradle for the light mount on our saddles. Wings fold down to protect the rails from abrasion and provide an anchor point for a paper insert that locks the rails in place. This solution worked well, but we felt the print quality of the corrugated was inferior our current chip board packaging and I began to work on a solution that keeps the ship board card.
Second Try
This is an insert that pops up and locks in place to prevent the rails from slipping out or vibrating in transit. Unfortunately, the raw edges of the corrugate caused some abrasion during testing.
Third Try
The next insert was a sled that protected the rails when sliding into the chip board. It used a perf to fold and better fit saddles with shorter rails. Unfortunately, our supplier gave us feedback this solution was too difficult to assemble.
