Under criticism from bloggers during Earth Week over the use of oversized boxes to ship tiny products, Dell sought the advice of its customers this week to help the company improve its packaging.

The Consumerist and other blogs showed photos of a Kingston 2gb USB flash drive that was sent to a customer in huge box. After the company read the posts, it sent a team to meet with the vendor in Dallas to figure out how to improve shipping processes.

On its corporate blog, Dell said it had developed several immediate and short term actions. For instance, it immediately sent a directive to use envelopes for small items like the flash drives.

In the short term, the company plans to use smaller boxes and has requested an optimization analysis of product volume to box size. It will also implement Dell-defined volumetrics on void space to be included in vendor reviews.

“While third party items such as these make up a very small portion of our overall shipping volume, folks here know we need to fix it,” Todd Dwyer, Dell’s community liaison of environment wrote in the company blog.

Dell isn't alone when it comes to publicly acknowledging issues that draw calls for action or criticism. HP, for instance, published its list of suppliers after investors, NGOs and other stakeholders consistently asked for more transparency in its supply chain.