What if you got to know that thousands of Apple’s MacBook and items from TV’s to kitchen appliances were dumped in landfill sites every year? Seems ridiculous, isn’t it? Well, an undercover investigation has found that Amazon is destroying millions of unsold stock every year. Footage gathered of one of the U.K.’s 24 fulfillment by Britain’s ITV which shows that the cartons of unsold items were marked ‘destroy’.
Many vendors or sellers keep their products in Amazon’s vast warehouses, & once they remain unsold for a long period, amazon finds it easy to dispose of them which is cheaper than continuing paying for their storage.
To provide a better and stronger perspective to the situation, an ex- employee of Amazon has confirmed to ITV that their weekly target to destroy the items was 1.3 lakh.“I used to gasp. There’s no rhyme or reason to what gets destroyed: Dyson fans, Hoovers, the occasional MacBook and iPad; the other day, 20,000 Covid (face) masks still in their wrappers. Overall, 50 percent of all items are unopened and still in their shrink wrap.
The other half are returned and in good condition. Staff have just become numb to what they are being asked to do.” Stated the former employee. Though apart from the boxes marked ‘ destroy’, there were other boxes which were marked ‘donate’ and you will be shocked to find the major difference between their quantity. While the goods to be destroyed were around 1,30,000 in numbers, goods to be donated were just 28,000 in the same period.
Responding to ITV News’ findings, the company stated, “We are working towards a goal of zero product disposal and our priority is to resell, donate to charitable organizations or recycle any unsold products. No items are sent to landfill in the UK.
As a last resort, we will send items to energy recovery, but we’re working hard to drive the number of times this happens down to zero.” A famous environmentalist commented on this whole situation by saying: ‘Amazon has been criticised before for its wasteful packaging and pollution from deliveries, and now we’re seeing evidence which suggests it is choosing to destroy perfectly good products too. ‘Not only is this likely adding to polluting landfill, electronics take huge amounts of water and resources to produce and handle climate-wrecking emissions when they’re shipped.
The public will be outraged at such wasteful behaviour and reckless disregard for the planet. According to the reports, In 2017, Amazon almost halved its UK tax bill from £7.4 million the previous year to just £4.5 million–despite its profits tripling from £24 million to £72 million.
Just think, the numbers we got are only from one fulfillment center. The study remains to seem at global level to figure out the total amount of loss amazon destroys every year globally!