California: Amazon’s reusable plastic packaging causes 32.15 million kilograms of waste annually, a new report has found. This waste, equivalent to the weight of three ships, is at risk of being transformed into more dangerous micro- and nanoplastics.
Over the years, scientists have increasingly discovered microplastics reaching every part of the Earth have been linked to cancer, cell death, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
The waste generated by the e-commerce company is enough to wrap itself around the world more than 800 times. This amount does not include Amazon’s millions of tons of cardboard and plastic packaging that cannot be reused.
Amazon’s so-called reusable plastics have to be returned to the company by customers, according to a new report. Amazon has set up specific locations where customers can deposit this waste. Less than five percent of the waste reaches the recycling center due to the lack of collection facilities from customers’ homes.
Jane Engstrom, director of the California branch of the American Public Interest Research Group and author of the report, said that in the study, researchers studied the effectiveness of Amazon’s system used to recycle plastic film packaging.
In the study, researchers attached tiny tracking devices to 93 bundles of Amazon’s plastic bags, plastic pillows and other items and left them at the company’s store drop-offs to see if it was labeled as trash. Only four of the 93 bags made it to the recycling center despite dropping off waste at Amazon’s designated locations.
Jane Engström and her co-author Celeste Mefferin-Swango said the researchers found no evidence that Amazon’s packaging was being widely recycled.