Amazon today set out the materials science behind extensible paper, the stretchier substrate now replacing plastic film across its North American packing lines, and attached fresh figures to a switch that has been running quietly since 2021.

In Short

Amazon has been swapping the plastic film in its delivery packaging for a kind of paper that stretches instead of tearing. It matters because plastic mailers recycle poorly, paper does not, and the parcel is the last physical object a customer touches before forming an opinion of the brand inside it. The practical change is that a growing share of Amazon parcels now arrive in brown paper sealed by machines that were built to run plastic.

A dart, a sheet, and a bounce

In a laboratory outside Seattle, John Sly loads a small sheet of plastic film into a drop test machine and releases a 200 gram dart from roughly a foot above it. The dart punches straight through. A standard sheet of brown Kraft paper goes into the same rig and produces the same result. A third sheet, similar in appearance but different in construction, sends the dart back up.

Sly, who leads materials science lab testing at Amazon, describes the procedure as a "smoking gun test." What it measures is tensile energy absorption, the amount of force a material takes before it tears. "When that energy absorption is higher, we get fewer failures in our fulfillment network," Sly says, according to Amazon.

That single bounce sits at the end of several years of testing, supplier specification work and machine retrofits. It also sits at the front of a set of numbers the company published alongside the account.

The figures Amazon attached to the shift

According to Amazon, automated fulfillment machines in North America avoided 288 million plastic bags during 2025. Over the same year, the share of North American shipments containing single-use plastic delivery packaging fell from 65 percent to 37 percent. Globally, 11 percent of orders shipped in 2025 travelled in their original manufacturer packaging with no additional Amazon material around them. Since 2015, the company puts the volume of packaging materials avoided across North America and Europe at 5.4 million metric tons.

One of those figures deserves a note. Amazon presents the drop from 65 percent to 37 percent as a 28 percent single-year decline. That is a fall of 28 percentage points. Expressed as a relative change, the decline is closer to 43 percent. Both readings describe the same movement, but they are not interchangeable, and the company's own summary card uses the smaller-sounding of the two.

The 5.4 million metric ton figure is also a cumulative avoidance claim measured against a counterfactual baseline rather than an audited reduction in tonnage purchased. Amazon has published progressively larger versions of the same claim in successive sustainability reports, which makes the trend line legible but the absolute number difficult to verify from outside.

Why plastic held the position for three decades

Plastic earned its place in parcel packaging on cost and handling. It is cheap, durable, and easy for machinery to work with. Polyethylene heat-seals by melting against itself, which forgives a great deal of imprecision at speed. Its weakness is downstream: recycling rates for film are low, the material frequently requires specialised processing rather than kerbside collection, and reprocessing it is often less economic than producing virgin resin.

Paper carries a different profile. A given fibre can be recycled five to seven times before it becomes unusable. In the United States during 2024, as much as 64 percent of paper and 74 percent of cardboard were recycled, according to the American Forest & Paper Association. Amazon frames the current moment as a return rather than an arrival, noting that Kraft paper mills across North America closed over the past three decades as plastic became the default. "What wasn't cool is now cool again," Sly says.

Sly's own route into the problem is unusual for a company better known for software. He studied paper science engineering at the University of Washington and spent his career in pulp and paper mills, running operations across pulping, bleaching and recycling, before joining Amazon in 2022. "We're on a mission to replace single-use plastics," he says. The evidence, in his account, is visible on the floor of the buildings themselves. "You see a lot more brown."

What extensible paper actually is

Not all paper behaves the same way, and the distinction matters more to machinery than to consumers. Standard Kraft paper is strong but stiff. A Kraft bag does not mould around its contents, which wastes volume in carts and delivery vans. It also resists the automated packing equipment that underpins Amazon's efficiency programme, tearing at fold points and demanding tighter tolerances than plastic ever did.

Extensible paper changes the mechanics. It stretches between 5 and 7 percent of its dimensions before ripping, roughly double to triple the give of conventional Kraft. It is produced on specialised paper machines that crepe the sheet while it remains partially wet, a step that reorients the fibres inside the sheet and allows it to absorb considerably more energy before failing. The material is not new in itself. Bags for concrete and sugar have used it for years, applications where the contents arrive suddenly and heavily.

Amazon has run extensible paper in its European operations since 2021. What changed in 2025 is the application of the material to e-commerce packaging at scale across North America, which required the company to define exactly which version of it works in its own network.

"Our goal was to link those fundamental material aspects all the way to how it performs in the field," says Alan Jacobsen, Amazon's director of materials science, who assembled the team for the task. The practical output of that work is a specification: the fibre properties, chemistry and performance benchmarks a supplier has to hit before its paper enters the network.

Seventeen drops and ninety minutes

Two laboratories carry the testing load, and they operate at different scales.

The first is a materials science lab staffed by around a dozen engineers running fundamental analysis. A valley beater, which resembles an open washing machine, circulates fibres through a refining process that mimics industrial manufacturing. One machine pushes air against packaging under hydraulic pressure until it ruptures, measuring burst strength. Climatic chambers and controlled rooms reproduce hot and humid shipping conditions. Permeation analysers measure how well a coating resists moisture and oxygen. A sheet former builds test sheets from a slurry of water and fibre. A freeness tester times how quickly water drains through fibres, a proxy for how much chemical and mechanical processing they have undergone, which allows results from different batches to be compared. An ink rub machine tries to smear printed labels into illegibility.

The second lab reproduces the journey rather than the material. Amazon developed its standard test route in collaboration with the International Safe Transit Association, a packaging trade body. The route runs 17 drops and two intervals of shaking across a 90 minute cycle, standing in for the carts, conveyor belts, trucks, aircraft and porches a parcel meets between warehouse and doorstep.

The equipment list reads as a catalogue of controlled abuse. An incline impact system hauls a package up a ramp and releases it into a steel block. A compression tester applies top-load pressure to simulate stacking. A shuttle dumper tips masses of packages onto conveyor belts. Drop platforms fold down like jump seats so parcels can fall at varying angles. Vibration tables reproduce the rumble of conveyors, trucks and vans. A forklift simulator squeezes packages from the sides, and a full conveyor loop circulates them repeatedly.

Every package is then assessed against a custom damage rubric covering punctures, tears, unsealed adhesive and compromised contents. The lab is attached to a small fulfillment centre that processes between 5,000 and 10,000 real customer shipments per day, which gives tested materials a live sample before wider deployment.

The machines had to be rebuilt

Automation and paper have historically sat awkwardly together. Plastic suited machinery because it melts, seals and tolerates speed. Paper does not naturally heat seal, tears under stress at fold points, and asks more of the equipment handling it.

The extra stretch in extensible paper supplies the tolerance machines need to fold, wrap and seal without splitting the web. Amazon materials scientists also developed water-soluble coatings that let the paper heat-seal in the way plastic does while remaining recyclable, a combination the company says underwent extensive testing to confirm the coatings do not compromise fibre recovery at the mill.

At the test lab, an automated packaging machine fed from a giant roll of extensible paper takes small products from an employee, sizes them against a set of presets, then seals, cuts and labels each parcel in a continuous run. The machine previously ran plastic. It was reengineered rather than replaced.

The limits are specific and, for now, unresolved. Items containing magnets stick to the machinery. Oversized products do not fit. Some products require specialised labelling the line cannot apply. Amazon began rolling extensible paper across its North American network during 2025, retrofitting existing machines as it went, and says the range of eligible packages grows as materials and equipment improve.

What this changes for brands and sellers

The parcel is one of the few surfaces in commerce that a brand does not rent. It arrives at a known address, at a known time, in the hands of a customer who has already paid. For sellers using platform fulfillment, that surface has been contracting from several directions at once.

Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment orders ship in unbranded packaging by design, with no Amazon marks on the outer box, which also means no seller marks. That service now reaches TikTok Shop through nine approved integration apps, placing a share of another marketplace's parcels inside Amazon's packing standards. Walmart permits Amazon fulfillment for its own marketplace orders only under neutral packaging and unbranded vehicle conditions. TikTok Shop went further on 3 September 2026, banning promotional inserts and review-bait materials among ten prohibited packing practices, removing one of the few zero-media-cost channels a seller controlled end to end.

Against that backdrop, a material change in the mailer itself is not a neutral operational detail. Extensible paper takes print, and it is the surface the customer sees. Whether Amazon opens that surface to sellers or keeps it as company livery is a commercial question the materials work does not settle.

Cost sits underneath the aesthetics. Amazon extended its Ships in Product Packaging programme to Multi-Channel Fulfillment and Buy with Prime orders in the United States during April 2026, a change that restructured cost mechanics for sellers depending on whether they opted into overboxing at account, order or API level. Packaging decisions made in a Seattle laboratory arrive on a seller's invoice several steps later.

The same infrastructure is being sold outward. Amazon opened its full logistics network to businesses with no marketplace presence through Amazon Supply Chain Services on 4 May 2026, bundling freight, more than 200 United States fulfillment centres and parcel delivery into one console, with Procter and Gamble, 3M, Lands' End and American Eagle Outfitters named as early adopters. A brand buying that service inherits Amazon's packaging specification along with its warehouses. For direct-to-consumer operations that treat the unboxing moment as owned media, the trade is real: the delivery promise improves and the physical brand expression narrows.

The third-party logistics sector faces the same specification pressure from the other end. Providers competing against platform networks now benchmark against a material standard set by a company that runs its own paper laboratory.

Regulation is moving in the same direction, faster

Europe is where the economics of packaging material have already been rewritten by law rather than by engineering. Regulation (EU) 2025/40 began to apply across all 27 member states on 12 August 2026, and its Article 45 assigns extended producer responsibility to whoever places packaging on a national market. A producer not established in the destination state must appoint an authorised representative there by written mandate, one per member state, with no single-window equivalent of the VAT one-stop shop.

The commercial effect on small sellers is documented rather than theoretical. One merchant faced a 4,300 euro compliance bill against 130 euro of actual eco-fees, and PPC Land has reported sellers switching off European shipping entirely rather than register per country. Article 24 caps the empty space ratio for grouped, transport and e-commerce packaging at 50 percent, though the calculation methodology is not expected before 12 February 2028.

Read against that regime, Amazon's decade of packaging reduction work looks less like a voluntary programme and more like a hedge that has now come due. A company that has already engineered material out of its parcels carries lower exposure when fees attach to the material that remains. Amazon has been building physical capacity at pace on the same logic, from drone delivery in the United Kingdom to a 48 billion dollar commitment in India, and its business marketplace doubled sales to 60 billion dollars across 1.8 million organisations.

Back in the Seattle lab, the dart still bounces. That is a narrow result, produced under controlled conditions on a sample sheet, and it stands in for a much larger bet: that a material abandoned by e-commerce thirty years ago can be re-engineered to meet machine tolerances that plastic set. The 37 percent figure suggests the bet is being placed at scale. The remaining 37 percent suggests it has not been settled.

Timeline

  • 20 December 1994: Directive 94/62/EC on packaging and packaging waste is adopted, establishing the European framework later replaced by the packaging regulation
  • 2015: Baseline year for Amazon's cumulative packaging avoidance claim across North America and Europe
  • 2021: Amazon begins using extensible paper in its European operations
  • 2022: John Sly joins Amazon after a career in pulp and paper mills
  • 2024: United States recycling rates reach 64 percent for paper and 74 percent for cardboard, according to the American Forest & Paper Association
  • 2025: Amazon begins rolling out extensible paper across its North American network, retrofitting existing packing machines
  • 2025: Automated fulfillment machines avoid 288 million plastic bags in North America; single-use plastic falls from 65 percent to 37 percent of North American shipments; 11 percent of global orders ship in original packaging
  • April 2026: Ships in Product Packaging extends to Multi-Channel Fulfillment and Buy with Prime orders in the United States, restructuring seller cost mechanics
  • 4 May 2026: Amazon Supply Chain Services opens the full logistics network to businesses without a marketplace presence
  • 6 August 2026: TikTok Shop documents Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment access through nine integration apps
  • 12 August 2026: Regulation (EU) 2025/40 begins to apply across all 27 member states
  • 3 September 2026: TikTok Shop publishes ten prohibited packing practices, including a ban on promotional inserts
  • 9 September 2026: Amazon publishes its account of extensible paper testing and the 2025 packaging figures
  • 12 February 2028: Expected date for the empty space ratio calculation methodology under Article 24

Summary

Who: Amazon, through its materials science organisation led by director Alan Jacobsen and lab testing lead John Sly, alongside paper suppliers producing to Amazon specification and the International Safe Transit Association, which co-developed the standard test route.

What: A published account of the testing behind extensible paper, a creped substrate that stretches 5 to 7 percent before tearing, together with 2025 packaging figures: 288 million plastic bags avoided by automated machines in North America, single-use plastic present in 37 percent of North American shipments against 65 percent a year earlier, 11 percent of global orders shipped in original packaging, and 5.4 million metric tons of packaging materials avoided since 2015.

When: Published 9 September 2026. Extensible paper has been in European operations since 2021, with the North American rollout beginning in 2025.

Where: Two Amazon laboratories outside Seattle, one for materials analysis and one simulating the full fulfillment journey, feeding a North American network that includes more than 200 United States fulfillment centres, plus European operations already running the material.

Why: Plastic film recycles poorly and increasingly attracts producer responsibility fees, while paper recycles kerbside five to seven times per fibre. Extensible paper resolves the one property that kept paper out of automated packing lines, giving machinery enough stretch to fold and seal without tearing. For brands, sellers and agencies, the material change lands on a parcel surface that is simultaneously being closed off by marketplace insert bans and unbranded fulfillment defaults.