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Revealed: Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in UK every year:
Online giant Amazon is destroying millions of items of unsold stock every year, products that are often new and unused, ITV News can reveal.
Footage gathered by ITV News shows waste on an astonishing level. And this is from just one of 24 fulfilment centres they currently operate in the UK.
[...] Undercover filming from inside Amazon's Dunfermline warehouse reveals the sheer scale of the waste: Smart TVs, laptops, drones, hairdryers, top of the range headphones, computer drives, books galore, thousands of sealed face masks – all sorted into boxes marked "destroy".
Products that were never sold, or returned by a customer. Almost all could have been redistributed to charities or those in need. Instead, they are thrown into vast bins, carried away by lorries (which we tracked), and dumped at either recycling centres or, worse, a landfill site.
An ex-employee, who asked for anonymity, told us: "From a Friday to a Friday our target was to generally destroy 130,000 items a week. "I used to gasp. There's no rhyme or reason to what gets destroyed: Dyson fans, Hoovers, the occasional MacBook and iPad; the other day, 20,000 Covid (face) masks still in their wrappers.
[...] "Overall, 50 percent of all items are unopened and still in their shrink wrap. The other half are returns and in good condition. Staff have just become numb to what they are being asked to do."
In one week in April, a leaked document from inside the Dunfermline warehouse showed more than 124,000 items marked 'destroy'. To repeat, that's just for seven days. In contrast, just 28,000 items in the same period were labelled 'donate'. The same manager admitted to us that in some weeks, as many as 200,000 items could be marked 'destroy'.
Why are hundreds of thousands of products being destroyed in this way? The answer is Amazon's hugely successful business model. Many vendors choose to house their products in Amazon's vast warehouses. But the longer the goods remain unsold, the more a company is charged to store them. It is eventually cheaper to dispose of the goods, especially stock from overseas, than to continue storing the stock.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Unixnut on Thursday June 24 2021, @09:54AM (6 children)
Yes, I used to dumpster dive when I was a kid. The amount of stuff I could get was phenomenal. In the days when each Windows update was so bloated that you needed to buy a new PC to run it, dumpsters were full of machines that were only 1 to 2 years old.
My interest in electronics and computers started back then, because while I could not afford a computer, I could build one out of all the parts I found in dumpsters. My crowning achievement was a dual PII MMX machine with 512MB of RAM, a serious luxury for me back then, which I managed to do by finding 3 PC's and one server in dumpsters, and taking the best bits out of all of them. All the other things I found (printers, fax machines, TV's, HiFI equipment) I was able to repair and use/resell, or break down to reuse the parts for my own projects.
Unfortunately, in the interests of "reducing waste", the EU put down the "WEEE Directive" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic_Equipment_Directive) which meant manufacturers had to collect and dispose of electrical equipment. People were forbidden from throwing it in the trash (and indeed, the local councils would refuse to collect electrical equipment put in the trash).
Me and my dad used to go to the local recycling centre, and actually pick up loads of stuff, old Hifi's, speaker systems, printers, electronics for free. After the WEEE Directive, the recycling centre actually put officers to monitor people to make sure nobody is picking up anything from the dumpsters. We had to leave a lovely Marantz HiFi system to be crushed because they intervened and threatened to call the police if we didn't put it back in the dumpster where we found it.
The result of this is that it is pretty much impossible to find any kind of electrical equipment in dumpsters or general trash. Now when I want something, even the most basic of electrical components, I have to buy it new.
The waste is staggering. Rather than reuse and recycle all this stuff, it just gets crushed. The only time I get some free stuff now is the company I work for. Every month the WEEE recycling company comes to
our offices to collect our electronic stuff for disposal, and the company lets employees take anything for themselves from the pile before it gets carted off. However most companies don't let you do that anymore either.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Thursday June 24 2021, @10:52AM (2 children)
> in the interests of "reducing waste", the EU put down the "WEEE Directive"
I thought it was to try to keep all of the nasties like heavy metals out of the landfill where they can leach into ground water etc. A good thing!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @07:49PM (1 child)
Nope! It came into effect the same time they banned all those metals. Also, there were never a significant quantity of them in the first place, and were not causing any contamination of anything.
This is purely government meddling for the sake of meddling. Mostly, the effect was to make things not last as long, while also making everything more expensive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @09:28PM
You realise it takes decades for products to exit the general supply once the chemicals are banned right?
I am not commenting on the motivations behind their decisions, just on the flaw in your logic...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Jiro on Thursday June 24 2021, @02:01PM (1 child)
>the company lets employees take anything for themselves from the pile before it gets carted off. However most companies don't let you do that anymore either.
Because if employees can take things from the pile, then employees can bribe the person in charge of throwing out the junk to throw out good equipment so the employee can take it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @03:15PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 24 2021, @09:46PM
my grandfather used to run the dump. you couldn't throw anything remotely interesting away, because it would just come right back home again; "can you *believe* the stuff people throw away these days?", he'd say.