Econnections

An initiative to accelerate sustainability in e-commerce

It is our mission to respond to the growing ecological footprint of the ecommerce sector by generating 500 million (more) sustainable online purchases by 2026.

To evoke sustainable change we pilot and help scale sustainable solutions over the entire value chain by leveraging an ecosystem of large organizations and scaleups. We enable companies and consumers to make sustainable choices, reduce emissions of parcel delivery, create sustainable packaging, and extend product lifespan.

Program

Econnections is an annual 5-month program that brings together large organizations, growing scaleups and knowledge partners to generate sustainable impact. This innovation program provides tailored guidance for scaleups to tackle their most important growth challenges and stimulates collaboration to make more sustainable impact within ecommerce together.
Partners explore sustainable alternatives by launching pilot projects together with scaleups. On top of that, scaleups gain access to industry experts and stress-test their sustainable propositions at scale. Knowledge partners ensure the most urgent challenges are tackled and share best practices with the world.

Pilots

Pilot projects form an opportunity to test the scaleup solution in a new context, related to a business problem provided by the large organizations. The scale-ups will get stuck into a series of real-world projects at partners bol.com, IKEA Nederland and PostNL. Technology and innovation leaders Deloitte, Google Cloud and Mollie are committing their expertise in growth strategy, technology, and implementation and upscaling of innovations. The pilot projects have now been selected:

• Chargetrip optimises route planning for electric vehicles (EVs), facilitating product deliveries in the best possible and most sustainable way. 
• Returnless works to reduce returns by making their processing more efficient.
•  Optiply’s integrated AI solution is being tested to optimise inventories and product top-ups for e-commerce customers.
•  Greenplan’s planning software is being trialled to help improve planning performance with the aim of reducing the number of kilometres driven, and so also carbon emissions.
•  One key way to reduce a company’s environmental footprint is to cut plastic polybag packaging, which is often used for external packaging when sending products. PlasticFri provides a sustainable alternative.
•  Drop&Loop is searching for solutions to reduce textile waste.
•  Manyfolds is focusing its efforts on a tailored packaging solution for fragile articles to help reduce damage and returns.