This Amazon Warehouse Was Caught Destroying 130,000 Unsold Items a Week
Despite its status as the world's largest retailer, Amazon has a history of unsavory business policies that keep the company in the headlines more than its shareholders would like, from its neglectful stance on workers' health to its tendency to veer into the world of antitrust—and that says nothing of the general animosity many feel towards the company's departing CEO. Now an exposé by the British news station ITV News sheds light on the brand's wasteful practices.
A warehouse in Scotland was revealed to be trashing an average of 130,000 items a week, including Dyson fans, Hoover vacuums, Mac computers, and even COVID-19 masks. All of the electrical items shown in the video were loaded onto trucks and disposed of at a waste management facility nearby, while the non-electrical items were sent to a local landfill and recycling site.
"Overall, 50 percent of all items are unopened and still in their shrink wrap. The other half are returns and in good condition," a former worker told IGTV. "Staff have just become numb to what they are being asked to do."
According to the segment, this strikingly large amount of waste is a byproduct of the company's overall setup. Amazon charges vendors to house their goods; the longer these products remain unsold in the warehouse, the more Amazon charges them, leading many vendors to choose the much cheaper option of disposal rather than the more costly alternative of paying to have the items shipped back to them.
“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,” a spokesperson told ITV. “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.”
We'll have to see if Amazon stays true to its word, but here's one unpromising bit of evidence: As leaked documents have shown, another of the company's UK warehouses was found to have only donated around 28,000 items of the supposed 124,000 total items marked for destruction.
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