According to an investigation by International News, Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, destroys millions of items of unsold stock. Many of them fresh and unused, every year in its UK warehouses. It was discreetly videotaped inside the company’s massive fulfillment center in Dunfermline, Scotland. There were “smart TVs, laptops, drones, hairdryers etc. were sorted into boxes labeled Destroy, according to the report.
More than 124,000 goods at the warehouse were marked Destroy, according to a leaked document cited by ITV. A total of 28,000 items were marked as Donate. The Dunfermline facility is one of 24 in the United Kingdom from which Amazon ships to clients in Ireland.
“It’s an unbelievable amount of waste, and it’s distress multi-billion-pound billion-pound corporation disposes of stock in this manner. Stuff that isn’t even single-use but utilizing utilized at all, right from the factory and into the trash. Things will only become worse as long as Amazon’s economic model is based on this kind of disposal mentality. The [UK] government must intervene and introduce legislation as soon as possible.”
Amazon’s UK boss, John Boumphrey, said in an interview before the probe that the amount of data the business destroys is “very minimal.”
It is not unlawful for the company, which posted global revenue of $386 billion (almost €325 billion) last year.
“From a Friday to a Friday, we aimed to normally destroy 130,000 objects a week,” a former manager tells a news organization. “I used to gasp when I heard something. What gets thrown out has no rhyme or reason” Dyson fans, Hoovers, the occasional MacBook, and iPad; just the other day, 20,000 Covid masks still in their packaging.
“We are working towards a goal of zero product disposal, and our focus is to resell, donate organizations, or recycle any unsold products. In the United Kingdom, no objects are disposed of in landfills. We’ll send objects to energy recovery as a last resort, but we’re working hard to reduce the number of times this happens to zero.” stated Amazon UK.
