The Associated Press reports that the environmental group Oceana says that "Amazon’s plastic waste jumped from 599 million pounds in 2020 to 709 million pounds last year — an amount that can circle the planet more than 800 times in the form of air pillows."
That's an 18 percent increase, year over year - and also runs contrary to Amazon's narrative. The company says "it has reduced its use of single-use plastic across its network … Amazon also said it was able to reduce the average weight of plastic in a shipment by over 7% but it did not disclose if its overall plastic footprint grew between 2020 and 2021, when it was seeing a boom in sales due to the pandemic."
“While we are making progress, we’re not satisfied,” the company said in the blog post. “We have work to do to continue to reduce packaging, particularly plastic packaging that’s harder to recycle, and we are undertaking a range of initiatives to do so.”
- KC's View:
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Both things can be true at the same time. It all depends on how the measuring is done and, apparently, who is doing the measuring. Where organizations can get into trouble is in doing some kind of shell game, selectively reporting only numbers that support a position. Not saying that is happening here, but a debate over numbers and honest reporting can impact credibility over the long term.
