Shareholders push Amazon to publish plastic waste management report

A group of shareholders has asked Amazon to disclose its plastic waste management to the public. The retail giant’s plastic pollution could not only damage its reputation but can also lead to financial penalties from clean-up costs and regulatory costs, as per shareholder proposal. They requested the company to publish a report by December that shows how much plastic waste is the giant responsible for and what is it doing to reduce it.

In 2019, Amazon was accused of generating 465 million pounds of plastic packaging waste by Oceana, a nonprofit organization. According to a report by Oceana, more than 22 million pounds of that waste ends up in freshwater and marine ecosystems.

Amazon in response to Oceana denied the claims and in a comment, the tech giant said that that year it only used about a quarter plastic of Oceana claimed, as per The Verge. If that’s the case that then Amazon has used around 116 million pounds of plastic in 2019 but the figure has not been confirmed by the company.

The shareholder proposal was led by shareholder activist group As You Sow, who has sent a similar proposal to nine other companies including, McDonald’s, Walmart and Target.

Amazon’s plastic mailer has a chasing-arrow symbol, associated with reusable and recyclable, but very few customers take initiative to dump the mailer at a location where it can be processed.

A study published in 2017 in Science Advances shows that only 9% of plastic waste has ever been recycled. But plenty end up in the oceans, and animal bellies, and even our own body as micro-plastic.