Amazon shoppers should expect less plastic in their packages this year.
The tech and e-commerce giant announced Thursday it was moving away from plastic air pillows — large tubes of inflated plastic tucked inside a cardboard box to keep items secure — and replacing them with recyclable filler paper.
Amazon has already swapped 95% of its plastic air pillows for recyclable paper in North America, the company said Thursday, and expects to fully remove the plastic pillows by the end of the year. It made a similar commitment to remove plastic pillows in Europe in 2022 and to remove single-use plastic packaging in India in 2020.
The change in North America will save nearly 15 billion plastic air pillows annually — marking Amazon’s largest reduction of plastic in North America to date, according to Pat Lindner, vice president of sustainable packaging at Amazon.
The shift comes after years of environmental activist groups and employees asking the company to take more action to mitigate its impact on the environment and commit to reducing its plastic use by at least one-third by 2030.
It also comes shortly after the environmental group Oceana released an April report that found Amazon generated 208 million pounds of plastic packaging waste in the U.S. in 2022, a nearly 10% increase from a year earlier. That quantity — in the form of plastic air pillows — could circle the Earth more than 200 times, Oceana said in its report.
“As one of the biggest retailers on the planet, Amazon is increasingly defining how our goods are packaged,” Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s senior vice president for strategic initiatives, said in April when the report was released. “The company can solve its plastic problem on a global basis now and into the future if it commits to do so — and follows through.”
Amazon disputed Oceana’s report. It said the total metric tons of single-use plastic used across its global operations decreased 11% from 2021 to 2022.
Oceana says that decrease is largely due to efforts outside the United States and has criticized Amazon for being slow to integrate the same plastic reduction methods it has used in other places in North America.
Littlejohn said Amazon’s reduction of plastic pillows was “welcome news.”
“While this is a significant step forward for the company, Amazon needs to build on this momentum and fulfill its multiyear commitment to transition its North America fulfillment centers away from plastic,” Littlejohn said in a statement.
Amazon’s Lindner said the North American and European markets aren’t always the same. There are different regional companies that provide the recyclable paper Amazon will use to replace the plastic air pillows and different considerations for weather conditions. In North America, the packages also have to travel farther, changing the equation for the materials needed to move products around, Lindner said.
“Our focus, primarily, up to this date, has been on reducing, rightsizing and minimizing packaging,” Lindner said. “That was really a high priority for us.”
Now, he continued, as Amazon has made progress on that goal, it has turned to the next thing: making more of its packaging curbside recyclable.
Amazon pledged in 2019 to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, part of its Climate Pledge. Net zero broadly means reaching a balance between greenhouse gasses going into the climate and those coming out. The company says it’s making progress on its climate goals through efforts to electrify its delivery fleet, switch to renewable energy sources and reduce the amount of packaging in its supply chain.
But some activist groups say those efforts aren’t doing enough. Amazon saw a slight drop in greenhouse emissions from 2021 to 2022, according to the most recent data available from the company, but its total footprint remained millions of metric tons larger than at the start of its climate pledge commitment.
At Amazon’s shareholder meeting last month, some investors once again called on the company to set a “time-bound” goal to make its packaging recyclable, reusable or compostable. The proposal did not pass; about 24% of shareholders voted in favor.
Lindner said reducing plastic is a “complex process of innovation” that involves a lot of testing before it can scale the changes to Amazon’s entire warehouse network.
“Our strategy is to make sure we get it right,” he said. “Timelines are important, but quality for the customer and ease of use in our facility is of utmost importance. When we get that right, these solutions will be for the long term.”
To reduce the amount of plastic, paper and cardboard that goes into keeping its online store running, Amazon operates a Packaging Innovation Lab in Sumner where it tests different iterations of packaging to see how much it can remove without risking product damage. It tried out different types of paper filler in various weather conditions and situations a package might encounter on its journey to a customers’ doorstep, Lindner said.
It also tested the transition from plastic air pillows to filler paper at its first fully automated warehouse in Euclid, Ohio. There, it found that employees liked the change because the paper took up less space and was easy to manipulate inside the package, Lindner said.
Amazon does not disclose the cost of these types of projects, Lindner said.
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