As shipping refuse continues to overwhelm landfills around the world, Bloomberg tried to figure why big companies — and Amazon in particular — haven’t tried to cut down on their packaging waste.
For those who haven’t gone near the trash recently, it’s bad. The story said that “globally, e-commerce companies use $20 billion worth of corrugated materials per year” and cited research that predicted “that the market for e-commerce packaging will expand at an annual rate of 14.3 percent through 2022.” Those figures are compounded by the fact that we’re recycling cardboard at a 20-year low.
Leading the charge in packaging use, of course, is Amazon. And for a company that has their logistics operation down to an exact science, they’re still “notorious for putting small items in large boxes.”
The problem, according to Bloomberg, “is that e-commerce companies haven’t really mastered the art of packaging for sustainability and customer convenience,” and they’ve “transferred to customers the responsibility for making sure it gets recycled.”
But with “nearly $1 trillion in market capitalization, Amazon could be doing more to help with the recycling of the packaging mess it creates wherever it ships,” the story (rightfully) notes.
Amazon responded saying they have “a team constantly working on innovations to cut waste” and that “in the last 10 years, they ‘eliminated more than 244,000 tons of packaging materials’ and ‘avoided 500 million shipping boxes with items that can ship in their own packaging.’” However, as the Bloomberg author was quick to point out, those figures are without context and therefore “meaningless.”
You can read more about it at Bloomberg.
