Amazon’s plastic pollution is under scrutiny today with the publication of a new report by the nonprofit ocean advocacy organization Oceana. That report estimates that Amazon was responsible for 465 million pounds of plastic packaging waste last year. Amazon says that figure is overblown — by over 350 percent. Amazon claims that it uses about a quarter of Oceana’s estimate, according to an email from the company to The Verge. If that’s the case, then Amazon still used more than 116 million pounds of plastic packaging in 2019. Amazon did not share what its total plastic footprint was either through a spokesperson or in its most recent sustainability report published last September.
Oceana still stands by the figures in its report, despite Amazon’s objections. “[Amazon] continues to, in response to questions about plastic use, offer anecdotes about packaging weight rather than transparency,” a spokesperson for the organization said in an email to The Verge. “Even the low number claimed by the company for its plastic packaging footprint would still be an enormous amount of plastic waste — enough to circle the earth over a hundred times in the form of air pillows and to cause very large problems for the oceans.” Oceana is concerned that as more people shop online, a greater share of leftover packaging will end up in the ocean. Since Amazon hasn’t publicly released numbers on its plastic pollution, Oceana tried to track it down itself. “What you don’t measure you cannot manage. So we had to estimate this,” says Anne Schroeer, a director of strategic initiatives at Oceana. “Obviously, it would be much better if Amazon would publish their plastic footprint.”
Using that assumption, Oceana estimated that up to 22 million pounds of Amazon’s plastic packaging waste polluted freshwater and marine ecosystems across the world last year. It based that projection on a study published earlier this year that estimated that 11 percent of global plastic waste wound up in aquatic ecosystems. That study, however, isn’t limited to packaging waste, which makes it difficult to use its data as a way to pinpoint how much plastic pollution Amazon sent to oceans, rivers, and lakes. “We share Oceana’s ambition to protect and restore the world’s oceans, and we support the reduced use of plastics. However, Oceana has dramatically miscalculated Amazon’s use of plastic,” a spokesperson for Amazon said in a statement.
Source: The Verge
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