After years of pressure from environmental advocates, global retail giant Amazon announced last week that it has eliminated plastic airbags from its global network of “fulfillment centers,” as Amazon calls its warehouse and distribution facilities. Around the world, products in the company’s packages are now covered by paper-based padding that can be collected in curbside recycling programs.
“We are committed to improving how orders are shipped, for the benefit of customers and the planet,” Amazon wrote in a blog post.
The announcement represents fulfillment of a promise Amazon made in June to work “to complete removal” of plastic airbags from North America by the end of the year. At the time, the company said it had already replaced 95 percent of its airbags across the continent with paper filler. Years before that, in 2021, Amazon plastic airbags phased out in Australiaand in 2022 it did the same for orders originating from its warehouses in Europe.
Oceana, a non-profit ocean advocacy group, has hounded Amazon for several years over its use of plastic, primarily through a series of reports quantify the company’s overall plastic footprint and its contribution to aquatic plastic pollution. Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s senior vice president for strategic initiatives, said Amazon’s announcement is “actually very significant,” even though the phaseout does not apply to orders shipped by third-party sellers. Amazon has not disclosed what fraction of its sales are achieved in this way. “It’s great news for the oceans and for the world at large that the world’s largest e-commerce company has done this,” Littlejohn said.
Yet Amazon still uses tens of thousands of tons of plastic each year in other forms of packaging — much of it thin, filmy plastic used in delivery bags and padded mailboxes. Plastic film is not only virtually impossible to recycle, but also the most common form of plastic litter in coastal waters and the most deadly type of plastic to large sea creatures. Oceana and other environmental groups say the company should strengthen its plastic reduction pledges by setting deadlines to move away from all types of single-use plastic packaging, and scale up reusable alternatives.
“We want the company to make a commitment to do more,” Littlejohn told Grist. He said Amazon’s actions could influence other major retailers to reduce their plastic use as well.
Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world, with a estimated value close to $2 trillion and annual revenues above $600 billion. It works in 21 countries and send to many more. In the US, Amazon rules almost 40 percent of the e-commerce market.
So far, Amazon’s greatest progress in plastic reduction has occurred in international jurisdictions, possibly due to stricter regulations on single-use plastics. The company’s warehouses in India are free from plastic packaging since 2020and its European distribution centers stopped using plastic delivery bags in 2022. These changes contributed to a 9 percent self-reported decrease in global plastic use between 2022 and 2023, according to an Amazon spokesperson.
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Plastics reduction has been slower in the US, perhaps due to the sheer size of its largest market. Oceana estimated that Amazon generated 208 million pounds of plastic packaging waste in the United States in 2022 — up about 10 percent from the previous year — though that doesn’t account for the company’s most recent efforts to switch to paper. In its recent blog post, Amazon said it has now retrofitted more than 120 automated packaging machines across the country to make paper bags, rather than plastic bags.
Amazon also hinted at it 2022 sustainability report that it is “phasing out padded bags containing plastic,” presumably referring to its ubiquitous blue-and-white mailboxes. Littlejohn said Amazon needs to make this commitment more precise by explaining its geographic scope and a timeline for achieving it.
The company also has in its most recent sustainability report that it is “working to reduce our use of single-use plastic packaging in favor of household recyclable alternatives.” Littlejohn said the emphasis on curbside recycling — instead of special take-back programs at retail stores — is significant. Currently, the company’s blue-and-white emails have a label that directs customers to “store download” recycling bins at places like Kohl’s, Safeway and Stop & Shop. But investigations by the media and environmental groups have shown that plastic is being collected in these containers are often sent to landfills and incineratorsrather than to a recycler. Plastic film that does get recycled is downgraded to non-recyclable products like deck chairs.
In response to Grist’s request for comment, an Amazon spokesperson pointed to previously announced plastic reduction efforts, including the complete elimination of plastic packaging from two U.S. distribution facilities.
“We recognize the importance of reducing single-use plastics, in the US and globally, but it cannot be done overnight,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. They went on to say that Amazon is “obsessed with getting it right for customers, and we’re incredibly proud of the progress so far.”
Amazon also said in its blog post last week that its first priority is to “completely remove packaging,” meaning it tries to ship products in their original packaging rather than Amazon-branded sleeves, bags, boxes and padding. to add. As of December last year, Amazon shipped one-third of its sales in North America without any additional packaging, and it said it would increase this fraction to two-thirds by December 2024.
As You Sow is a not-for-profit shareholder advocacy organization that filed various decisions at Amazon asking the company to disclose and reduce its plastic packaging footprint. Conrad MacKerron, the organization’s senior vice president, noted that there are still many opportunities outside of Amazon’s e-commerce business to reduce unnecessary plastic packaging. For example, he said, Amazon sells many private-label food and beverage products packaged in flexible plastic, such as bags of nuts and candy. These products contribute to plastic pollution, even if they are sent to shoppers in a paper envelope.
Amazon also owns Whole Foods, one of the largest grocery chains in the United States, where entire aisles of produce are sold in flimsy plastic packaging that is virtually impossible to recycle. Many of these products are sold by Whole Foods Market under the Amazon-owned 365 label. “Unlike PET bottles, that flexible packaging can’t really be recycled anywhere in the world at this point. It all goes to the landfill,” MacKerron said. He said he would like to see Amazon “re-evaluate” its use of plastic in grocery stores, “given that there is nothing on the horizon that will provide a recycling option” for it.
