In a significant move towards sustainability, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has decided to replace plastic air pillows with recycled paper in its North American shipments.
What Happened: Amazon has successfully eliminated approximately 95% of the thin plastic cushions in its largest market and aims to remove the rest by the end of the year. This initiative is one of Amazon's most significant moves towards ending the use of single-use plastic in its packaging, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
Amazon's next step, as revealed by Pat Lindner, an Amazon vice president overseeing the company's sustainable packaging initiatives, is to replace the difficult-to-recycle white and blue plastic mailers with paper sleeves. The company is optimistic about implementing this on a larger scale in the upcoming months.
Amazon has faced criticism from environmental groups for its contribution to plastic waste in global oceans. In 2022, nearly 50% of Amazon's investors backed a proposal urging the company to detail its plans to reduce plastic usage. The company reported using 85,916 metric tons of single-use plastic in worldwide shipments in 2022, marking a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Why It Matters: Amazon's efforts to reduce plastic usage aren't limited to North America. The company has made considerable progress in Europe, where it ceased using most plastic packaging by the end of 2022. In August, Amazon initiated a program to deliver orders without extra packaging to reduce waste and appeal to environmentally-conscious customers.
Furthermore, in May, Amazon unveiled the first of twelve electric big rigs, marking its first foray into electric big rigs and furthering its goal to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
Last year, Amazon retrofitted a warehouse in Ohio to ship products without any added plastic, using custom paper mailers and machines capable of building made-to-fit cardboard boxes around individual products.
Price Action: At the time of writing, Amazon was trading 0.10% higher on Thursday's pre-market at $182.99 after it closed at $182.81 on Tuesday.