It's the holiday season and many people are already purchasing gifts, increasingly online. At VF, we are committed to reducing our environmental impacts, including lessening our packaging footprint. To do this, we look to eliminate packaging when possible; sourcing packaging from alternative origins (e.g. recycled materials) and implementing circular processes to reduce packaging waste.

When you receive a package, you might notice that items are often individually wrapped in plastic. This plastic bag is called a polybag. Polybags can be challenging for consumers to recycle and often end up in landfills, incinerated, or disposed of incorrectly. Given the pervasiveness of these bags, VF is working on possible solutions to better manage this plastic, including creating a more circular system that recycles these polybags and prevent them from ending up in nature.

While it may seem simple to eliminate these bags from our business, they serve an important purpose to protect VF products throughout their journey from creation to consumer. When a product is damaged and needs to be replaced because it was not protected, energy and materials are wasted, potentially doubling the product's environmental impact.

In 2021 The North Face first piloted the "Naked Delivery" program in EMEA. This program came to life through the European Outdoor Group's Single Use Plastics Project (SUPP), a collaboration of more than 40 brands and retailers to collectively address single use plastic polybags. The North Face joined this industry-wide challenge because it believes that closely working with our peers to enact joint solutions will achieve the most impactful results.

During the pilot, e-commerce consumers and retail stores received select products polybag-free. To address the challenges mentioned above, VF removed polybags at the warehouse, before they were shipped to their end destination. This allowed VF to recycle all polybags into high-quality plastic pellets to be repurposed as new polybags among other things. This process alleviated the burden from the consumer to recycle these bags and removed the possibility of polybag waste.

The pilot was a huge success and has expanded to more VF brands. Consumers have been overwhelmingly pleased with their "Naked Delivery" items, with over 90% saying that their order arrived in same or better condition compared to other online purchases of similar products and over 85% saying they would like to continue receiving orders without polybags.

As of November 2024, this program has recycled over 30,000kg of plastic and over 3 million products have been delivered without a plastic polybag. We are excited to watch these numbers grow as we expand the program and roll it out across all VF brands, regions and distribution centers over time.

The above video shares more about polybags and this program, as well as our partnerships across brands and with the Single Use Plastics Project to address this issue.