Amazon scraps 130,000 items a week at one fulfilment centre

Here in the UK, one of our national news channels ran an expose on Amazon’s waste policies this week and it really made grim watching.In a decent bit of investigative reporting, ITV found that Amazon was disposing around 130,000 items a week at the company’s fulfilment centre in Dunfermline in Scotland. Dunfermline is one of 17 fulfilment centres in the UK, although it is often used for returns, so we cannot extrapolate numbers across the UK from what is dumped in Scotland. Either way, it is a huge amount of waste to be destroyed, especially as around half of the products were brand new in sealed packaging. The goods included many items of e-waste, with some very expensive products like TVs, laptops and iPads being marked for destruction. E-waste is bad for the environment if dumped in landfill, as poisonous chemicals can leech from the electronics into the ground. Amazon claimed none of the products were sent to landfill, but two years ago the Mail on Sunday actually did track waste from Amazon directly to a landfill. E-waste can often be very difficult to recycle, but Amazon can be one of the most innovative companies in the world, and it is a shame they don’t seem to be trying much harder than paying a contractor to dispose of it, especially as contractors have been found to be less than honest on many cases.

The company is at the forefront of technology, with a lead in cloud services and AI, as well as its traditional logistics and e-commerce business. Amazon has also been innovative in the automation of the company’s logistics operation. Hopefully in the future it will look to develop a profitable way to recycle unsold goods safely, or even send a more significant proportion of them to charities. With a focus on sustainability for most companies, Amazon should look to the circular economy to try recycle the goods back into raw materials for other goods it manufactures.

One place that Amazon could talk to is the Hypothetical Materials Lab at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering. Researchers at the lab have recently developed a framework that helps us understand the choices a recycler has to make and the role that digital fraud prevention could have in preventing dishonest recycling practices. The report found that some US companies who say they use green recycling practices actually illegally stockpile waste, abandon it, or send it abroad. From 2014 to 2016, the Basel Action Network used GPS trackers in electronics delivered to U.S. recyclers to show that 30% of the products ended up overseas.

The development of a model framework allowed the researchers to analyse dishonest end-of-life e-waste management and why recyclers are dishonest about their activities. Unsurprisingly, it was found that cash was the main motivator and the costs of recycling needs to increase and/or penalties for malpractice need to be higher. The researchers also suggest that blockchain could be used as third-party supervision to avoid fraudulent recycling practices.

The research is part of a larger NSF-funded convergence research project on the circular economy, which is led by Melissa Bilec, deputy director of the Mascaro Center, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Roberta A. Luxbacher Faculty Fellow at Pitt.