A problem IKEA has identified is that many of their low value products use excessive space on load units due to packaging design. This packaging design results in poor efficiency in both the transportation and warehouse operations, and thereby creates unnecessary costs. An example of such a low value product is the Glimma tea candle, shown in the picture below.
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| Design for environment by IKEA |
The original packaging was a plastic bag randomly filled with 100 candles. The round shape of the candles and the nature of the packaging process resulted in a bag containing a substantial portion of air. To solve this problem, the air has to been taken out of the bag and the number of candles per unit increased. IKEAs solution is to place the candles in such a pattern that the density of the product package is increased, removing excess air. By using a new packaging method it is possible to decrease the amount of air enclosed in the Glimma packaging process. Instead of using the previous method of randomly filling a plastic bag with 100 Glimma tea candles, they are now neatly stacked in five rows, 4 x 5 candles in each layer.
The result was that more candles could be loaded on each pallet, rising from around 250 to 360 packs. By increasing the load capacity, the total amout of pallets shipped worldwide every year could be reduced from 60T to 42T.
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