Amazon under pressure to reveal plastic footprint

Amazon is under increasing pressure to reduce its plastic footprint, as shareholders approved a resolution urging the company to reveal how much of its plastic packaging ends up in the environment.

Report

The resolution, instigated by activist shareholder group As You Sow, calls on the online retailer to release a report by December this year detailing the scale of the problem. The shareholders want to know how much plastic packaging the company uses and what measures it has taken to reduce the mountain of waste. However, Amazon’s board of directors had advised shareholders to vote against the proposal, writes Retail Gazette.

Last year, environmental conservation organisation Oceana estimated that Amazon had generated as much as 210,000 tonnes of plastic packaging waste by 2019. Amazon has always disputed these figures and accuses the group of miscalculation. The American company also claims that since 2015 it has reduced the weight of outgoing packaging by more than a third and eliminated more than a million tonnes of packaging.