Amazon’s burning approach to unsold and returned products

In January 2021, an undercover report by ITV revealed how Amazon was discarding vast quantities of perfectly usable goods. The report identified items such as laptops, shavers, headphones, smart TVs, as well as brand new books, jewellery and hygiene products. Almost all of these items, either returned or unsold, were thrown away in perfectly good condition by the company.

What are the claims against Amazon?

The whistleblower from the Dunfermline warehouse provided evidence that Amazon marked over 120,000 items for destruction every single week. Some weeks this number went up to 200,000.

The marked items were placed in the sinister sounding ‘Destruction zone’ and taken to landfill or for incineration.

In the same length of time – one week – Amazon donated less than a quarter of that amount (28,000 items) to charity.

Why are millions of items destroyed by Amazon?

Every sane person must wonder why Amazon actively destroys new and usable products. 

The answer lies behind Amazon’s business model. The retail giant charges vendors that sell through its platform for shelf space in its warehouses. If the products are not sold within a short period of time, Amazon increases the storage costs, but also offers disposal as a fee-based service. Amazon pivots for fast sales: soon it becomes cheaper for these vendors to dispose of the goods than to keep storing them.  

Some vendors have other reasons for destroying goods: well-known brands may want to protect their identity and brand, and will sooner destroy their stock than see lesser valued items on the market.

Another investigation by Greenpeace, Business Insider and ZDF frontal came to the same conclusion, this time in Germany. Viola Wohlgemuth, a Resource conservation expert at Greenpeace said “Amazon considers the space on the shelf more valuable than the product inside”.

This latter report was published in November 2022 – almost two years after ITV’s first account of these damaging practices. Amazon seemingly had done little to change its ways.

Legal challenges to Amazon dumping new goods

Thankfully, some legislators are on Amazon’s case. A proposed new Bill in Ireland brought by Senator Lynn Boylan and colleagues forbids the destruction of unsold non-food items and penalizes companies for doing so, in the Ban on Dumping New Products Bill 2022 (Ireland). For each offence, companies would need to pay up to €3000 (about £2600). 

Even for a company as wealthy as Amazon, paying such a large fine (120,000 items x £2600 is after all almost £312 million per week, per warehouse) would be prohibitive. Instead, the bill would make it mandatory for all these items to be donated to charity shops and secondhand shops. Amazon might point to some of its current donation schemes, such as one in Wales near its Swansea warehouse, but as we highlight below, the number of items donated is miniscule compared to the amount thrown away.

The Bill completed the third stage in the Irish upper house in July 2023. It still has a way to go to become law. However, should it reach that stage, it could be a game changer, especially, if UK politicians gather the courage to propose similar legislation. 

What does Amazon say about its throwaway policy?

ITV interviewed Amazon UK’s Head of Operations John Boumphrey, who said at the time that the number of items destroyed was "extremely small". 

On its website it is very reassuring, too. It claims that more than 7.6 million products were repaired in the U.S. and Europe through repair partners in 2022.

Its ‘Amazon Second Chance’ programme helps its customers to avoid waste through buzzwords such as “recycle & trade in electronics” or “repair items” and “shop pre-owned items”. 

There must, of course, be some truth behind these claims. After all, in the US alone approximately 3.5 billion products get returned by customers each year. But due to the sheer scale of the number of sales, even a small percentage of returned items are in the millions. This is confirmed by Tobin Moore, CEO of returns solution provider Optoro, who said that “from all those returns, there’s now nearly 6 billion pounds of landfill waste generated a year and 16 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions as well”. 

This behaviour is clearly not compatible with a sustainble society and a livable planet. 

We call on Amazon to publish annual figures globally for the number of products destroyed each year, and to manage it down to zero within two years.

Visit our Amazon campaign page to find out more about our boycott call.