Online retail — and Amazon — has a plastic problem
By Marc Fawcett-Atkinson | 5/17/21 | Canada’s National Observer
Amazon’s investors could soon force it to reveal how much plastic it mails to customers around the world each year.
A shareholder resolution set to be voted on later this month would require the e-commerce giant to publicly disclose its plastic use. If successful, environmentalists say the public pressure resulting from more transparency could drive a broader shift in the booming global e-commerce industry away from harmful plastic packaging.
Almost half of Canada’s e-commerce plastic packaging, about 21 million kilograms, is estimated to have come from Amazon in 2019. Worldwide, Amazon is thought to be responsible for roughly a quarter of the 942 million kilograms of plastic packaging shipped each year by online stores, according to a 2020 study by the U.S. and Canada-based environmental organization Oceana, which was not peer-reviewed. Most can’t be recycled and ends up in landfills or the environment, contributing to a growing plastic pollution crisis.
“They’re a big polluter,” said Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s senior vice-president. A majority of the company’s plastic packaging are thin, flexible plastic films that are almost impossible to recycle and disproportionately harm marine animals, he explained.
Flexible packaging accounts for about 60 per cent of all plastic production, but roughly 80 per cent of the estimated 9.9 million kilograms of plastic enters the world's oceans annually, noted the shareholder resolution.
Amazon, however, said in a statement that its plastic footprint is far smaller than Oceana's calculations, insisting that errors in the organization's research methodology led to false conclusions.