Amazon is limiting plastic in the US after years of criticism

Amazon shoppers should expect to see less plastic in their packaging this year.

The tech and e-commerce giant announced Thursday that it is moving away from plastic airbags – large tubes of inflated plastic placed in a cardboard box to protect items – and replacing them with recyclable filler paper.

Amazon has already replaced 95% of its plastic air cushions with recyclable paper in North America, the company said Thursday, and it expects to completely eliminate plastic air cushions by the end of the year. It has similarly committed to phasing out plastic pillows in Europe in 2022 and single-use plastic packaging in India in 2020.

According to Pat Lindner, vice president of sustainable packaging at Amazon, the change in North America will save nearly 15 billion plastic airbags annually, marking Amazon’s largest-ever plastic reduction in North America.

The change comes after years of environmental activist groups and workers asking the company to take more action to reduce its environmental impact and commit to reducing its use of plastics by at least a third by 2030.

The ruling also came shortly after environmental group Oceana released an April report showing that Amazon generated 208 million pounds of plastic packaging waste in the U.S. in 2022, an increase of almost 10% year-over-year previous one. That amount – in the form of plastic airbags – could orbit the Earth more than 200 times, Oceana said in its report.

“As one of the world’s largest retailers, Amazon increasingly determines how our goods are packaged,” Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s senior vice president of strategic initiatives, said in April when the report was released. “The company can solve its plastic problem on a global scale now and in the future if it commits to doing so and follows through.”

Amazon disputed Oceana’s report. It said total metric tons of single-use plastic used in its global operations declined by 11% from 2021 to 2022.

Oceana says the decline is largely due to efforts outside the United States and criticized Amazon for being slow to implement the same plastic reduction methods it has used elsewhere in North America.

Littlejohn said Amazon’s reduction in plastic pillows is “welcome news.”

“While this is a significant step forward for the company, Amazon must build on this momentum and fulfill its long-standing commitment to transition its North American fulfillment centers away from plastics,” Littlejohn said in a statement.

Amazon’s Lindner said the North American and European markets are not always the same. There are various regional companies that provide the recyclable paper that Amazon will use to replace plastic airbags, and they take different weather conditions into account. In North America, packages also have to travel farther, which changes the equation for the materials needed to move products, Lindner said.

“So far, our main focus has been on shrinking, right-sizing and minimizing packaging,” Lindner said. “That was really a priority for us.”

Now, he continued, as Amazon has made progress on that goal, it has moved on to the next thing: increasing its curbside packaging recycling capabilities.

In 2019, Amazon pledged to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040 as part of its climate pledge. Net zero generally means achieving a balance between the greenhouse gases that go into the climate and those that go out. The company says it is making progress on its climate goals through efforts to electrify its delivery fleet, shift to renewable energy sources and reduce packaging in its supply chain.

However, some activist groups say these efforts are not producing enough results. According to the latest data available from the company, Amazon saw a slight decline in greenhouse gas emissions from 2021 to 2022, but its overall footprint remained millions of tons higher than at the start of its climate commitment.

At Amazon’s shareholder meeting last month, some investors once again called on the company to set a “time-bound” goal for packaging to be recyclable, reusable or compostable. The proposal was not accepted; Approximately 24% of shareholders voted in favor of adoption.

Lindner said reducing plastic is a “complex innovation process” that requires a lot of testing before changes can be made across Amazon’s warehouse network.

“Our strategy is to make sure we get it right,” he said. “Deadlines are important, but quality for the customer and ease of use at our facility are most important. When we get this right, these solutions will be sustainable.”

To reduce the amount of plastic, paper and cardboard used to maintain its online store, Amazon runs a packaging innovation lab in Sumner, where it tests different packaging iterations to see how much can be removed without risking product damage. Different types of paper fillers were tried in various weather conditions and situations a package might encounter on its way to a customer’s door, Lindner said.

In its first fully automated warehouse in Euclid, it also tested the switch from plastic airbags to paper filler, Ohio. There, they found that workers liked the change because the paper took up less space and could be easily manipulated inside the package, Lindner said.

Amazon does not disclose the costs of these types of projects, Lindner said.