Amazon still has a serious plastic waste problem in the US

Products connected a conveyor loop are scanned astatine an Amazon fulfillment center, wherever they are being sorted and shipped retired during Cyber Monday connected November 27th, 2023, successful Tampa, Florida. | Photo by Octavio Jones / Getty Images

Despite making pledges to chopped down connected integrative packaging, a caller report from the nonprofit conservation enactment Oceana estimates that Amazon’s integrative discarded has continued to turn successful the US.

The institution created 208 cardinal pounds of integrative discarded from its packaging successful the US successful 2022 alone, which Oceana says is capable trash to ellipse Earth much than 200 times successful the signifier of integrative aerial pillows. That’s a astir 10 percent leap from the magnitude of integrative discarded it generated the twelvemonth before, according to the report.

The US is simply a worrying outlier for Amazon, Oceana says. Globally, the e-commerce elephantine says that it reduced its usage of integrative packaging 11.6 percent successful 2022 compared to the anterior year. But the US is the company’s biggest market, and Oceana argues it’s wherever Amazon needs to marque a batch much progress.

“Why are U.S. customers being near behind?” Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s elder vice president for strategical initiatives, said successful an emailed press release.

There’s not overmuch transparency connected however overmuch integrative discarded Amazon pumps retired from spot to place. Its latest sustainability report, which covers 2022, doesn’t interruption the information down by country. It besides doesn’t study connected each the integrative discarded generated by orders fulfilled by third-party sellers. So Oceana relied connected marketplace information from firms Mordor Intelligence and Euromonitor to behaviour its analysis, and past made adjustments based connected nationalist statements Amazon has made astir caller measures meant to trim waste.

In an email to The Verge, Amazon vice president of mechatronics and sustainable packaging Pat Lindner called Oceana’s investigation a “misleading study with exaggerated and inaccurate accusation astir our integrative packaging” and pointed to the company’s “multi-year effort to destruct integrative transportation packaging from our US automated fulfillment centers.”

Amazon got escaped of single-use integrative transportation bags for orders shipped from its fulfillment centers successful Europe successful 2022. It did the aforesaid in India successful 2020. The power has been slower successful the US, wherever a fulfillment halfway successful Ohio became the first successful the federation to replace integrative transportation packaging with insubstantial alternatives successful 2023.

Plastic movie bags utilized for packaging mostly aren’t accepted successful curbside recycling programs. Because this benignant of integrative is trickier to rehash than bottles, consumers who privation to steer it distant from landfills and incinerators would request to instrumentality it to designated drop-off locations successful the US.

In July of past year, Amazon appeared to marque a vague commitment to ditch immoderate of its iconic integrative packaging altogether. “We are phasing retired padded bags containing plastics successful favour of recyclable alternatives,” the institution said successful its sustainability study astatine the time. But it didn’t acceptable a timeline for erstwhile that would happen.

Oceana wants to spot the institution signifier retired integrative packaging successful its location base, the US. It’s besides calling connected Amazon to shrink the full magnitude of integrative packaging it uses by a minimum of one-third by the extremity of the decade.