While bottled water is easily the most wasteful indulgence in the first world, it’s also not going anywhere. Convenience water is a $24 billion market in the U.S., where more than 1 billion plastic water bottles are shipped annually.
The company sends its cartons to its filling plants empty. A single pallet can hold some 35,000 empty, flat-packed Boxed Water cartons.
"We’re an impermanent product. At the end of the day, 75 percent of it is paper," Adams says. "It’s not not made to last forever. Whereas 100 percent of a PVC water bottle is going to be in a landfill for a thousand years."
via Is Boxed Water Actually Better? – CityLab.
A logistical answer to a non-logistics question — love it. Reminds me of a question on MindSumo about how to ship potato chips better in higher elevation (lower pressure) places, which causes the chip bags to expand/contract accordingly, resulting in wasted space in the truck shipping the chips.