Amazon's new eco-friendly boxes offer an augmented reality experience

Amazon is celebrating Halloween and showing off its eco-conscious efforts at the same time this year.

Between now and Oct. 31, your Amazon packages will look a little different than usual. The eco-friendly boxes use less material than previous boxes and feature a large white pumpkin on the side, where customers can draw whatever design they desire and then see it come to life via the company’s augmented reality tech.

To do that, customers will need to download Amazon’s AR app and scan the QR code on the box with their phone camera. Once the code is scanned, an animated recreation of the drawing will come to life on screen, similar to Snapchat’s popular AR filters.

Art by a 3 year old. Credit: amazon ar

Terror by Amazon. Credit: amazon ar

“The new experience is a low-cost way for customers to celebrate and a fun way to reuse boxes before dropping them in the recycling bin,” Amazon said in a statement to CNN Business.

The company hopes the concept of reusing the boxes (even just for some Halloween fun) will bring attention to Amazon’s environmental initiatives. The project comes from Amazon’s 85-person packaging team. The group focuses on improving packaging to use less waste in the process of getting products to consumers.

And cardboard boxes make up a lot of the company’s product waste.

Fast Company reported that Amazon shipped more than 5 billion items worldwide in 2017 through Prime alone, all of which requires packaging material that eventually gets thrown out. Hopefully, initiatives like this Halloween project — and others — will help in the ongoing, very real battle against packaging waste.