Shareholders are set to vote on whether the board of directors at US online retail giant Amazon will need to issue a report by the end of the year on the company’s use of plastic packaging, the amount of plastics it releases into the environment, and its strategies or goals to reduce the such packaging. The agenda for this year’s Amazon shareholders meeting includes the proposal, which is to be voted on “if properly presented” at the 26 May event.

The company said the board recommends a vote against the proposal, stating that the retailer has already made other long-term commitments to sustainability through programmes such as its “Shipment Zero”, “Frustration-Free Packaging”, and renewable energy arrangements. Amazon is also a signatory of “The Climate Pledge”, which aims to implement decarbonisation strategies in line with the Paris Agreement.

The proposal was supported by US activist group As You Sow (Berkeley, California; www.asyousow.org), which filed shareholder suggestions with nine other consumer goods giants to reduce plastics use earlier this year (see Plasteurope.com of 25.02.2021).

Although Amazon has refrained from revealing details on its plastics consumption, a 2020 report by marine environment protection organisation Oceana (www.oceana.org) claimed that the retail giant generated 210,920 t of plastic packaging waste in 2019 and estimated that up to 10,178 t of Amazon’s plastic packaging waste entered and polluted the world’s freshwater and marine ecosystems in 2019. While a number of brand owners have been leading the way in renewable packaging of late (see Plasteurope.com of 10.03.2021), Amazon has been taking a different path since 2019 (see Plasteurope.com of 27.03.2019).

Amazon’s response to Oceana’s report said that the organisation had “miscalculated Amazon’s use of plastic” and that it uses “about a quarter of the plastic packaging estimated by your report” – which corresponds to 52,617 t of plastics being used by Amazon in 2019. The company claimed to have reduced the weight of outbound packaging by more a third and eliminated more than 1m t of packaging material since 2015.