Designer Yves Behar helps PUMA reduce the company’s waste “footprint” by replacing the box with a bag!

PUMA ships millions of shoes in bright orange and white shoeboxes every year. Although the boxes are great to store things in, they also account for a lot of paper waste. In an attempt to reduce the company’s overall carbon emissions, paper waste, energy consumption and water usage, PUMA has teamed up with San-Francisco based designer Yves Behar and his design studio fuseproject to introduce the “Clever Little Bag.” Although it took 21 months, 2,000 ideas and 40 prototypes to come up with the idea, this bag is definitely going to revolutionize the shoe box industry.

Why is the bag so clever? First of all, it’s a reusable bag that comes with a single sheet of ink-free recycled cardboard, so it uses 65% less cardboard than other shoe boxes. It also comes with no tissue paper, so you don’t have to worry about additional paper waste. The bag is also non-woven (it was stitched with heat), so that means less energy was used for its overall production.

Another green feature of the bag: it’s made from recycled PET plastic.

PUMA says these bags will help the company save:

• 8,500 tons of paper
• 20 million megajoules of electricity
• 1 million liters of water
• 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide

Here’s a short video that explains the benefits of the bag:

I’m not sure that it should have taken 21 months to come up with the idea of using a bag instead of a box, but hey, at least it’s here now. The clever little bag is a great idea, and I hope that it will help PUMA to inspire other companies to go green.