If you have bought one of the new iPhone 13, you may have noticed a detail: its box was not wrapped in plastic. At first glance it gives a bad feeling, because it seems that they are selling you an unsealed iPhone. But no: a strip of paper conveniently placed on one of the lower edges of the lid seals the package.
It seems that this is the prelude to a much bigger change: Apple wants to stop using plastics in all its packages and boxes by 2025 as confirmed yesterday during the quarterly financial results. It has been starting to do it for some time in some details such as the cable protectors (now they are wrapped in a paper), and in the power adapter wraps that are now made of vegetable paper.
A matter of size
The AirPods 3 also come with a discreet paper seal, but the newly released MacBook Pros still come sealed in plastic. Surely the change will be starting in the small boxes, and in Apple they must still be thinking about the best way to add that same system to medium boxes like those of laptops. In the larger ones, as in the case of the iMac or Mac Pro, there is also no plastic seal since the box itself contains closures and cardboard mechanisms.
It’s small changes like this that keep Apple moving towards its promise to be emissions neutral with all its suppliers in 2030. We will see more and more steps like this in the remainder of the decade, both outside the boxes and inside. of them.
Image | Saad Chaudhry