Amazon India on Monday announced that it has stopped using single-use plastics in packaging of goods at all of its fulfilment centres across the country, sticking to its commitment made nine months ago to utilize only reusable or recyclable materials.
The company has replaced bubble wrap and plastic pillows with paper dunnage and biodegradable paper tape, and said it is also closely working with sellers on its platform who directly ship products to consumers, to adopt its sustainable packaging practices. It has also stopped the use of cling film for packaging products.
“We have successfully eliminated 100% single-use plastic from our packaging across all our fulfilment centres. Despite some of the headwinds that we saw because of the lockdown or the pandemic, some real accelerated work has made this happen in 9 months,” said Prakash Kumar Dutta, director of customer fulfilment and supply chain at Amazon India.
Apart from replacing single-use plastics from its packaging, the company said it has also invested in technology to club separate orders bought by the same customer without reducing the shipping experience. It is also working with several brands to create robust packaging that doesn’t require Amazon to repackage them for shipping.
Doing away with single-use plastics is one of the sustainability goals Amazon has set, along with bringing 10,000 electric vehicles by 2025 onto India’s roads for the last mile delivery of packages.
Its rival Walmart-owned Flipkart too has pledged to eliminate the use of single-use plastics in its packaging. The company has also piloted the use of EVs in deliveries for the past few years but has not set a target on building an electrified delivery fleet as of now.
E-commerce companies’ move towards sustainable packaging happened after the government met with key industry stakeholders, asking them to build more sustainable businesses last year. The government has not set any specific goals for e-commerce firms in terms of reduction of single-use plastics, instead companies have made it a voluntary effort.
Online firms were targeted for their excessive use of packaging materials, which some senior government officials said, would not be used if sales were made offline. They’d said that if e-commerce firms would not stop the excessive use of plastics in packaging, they’d be mandated to pick up empty cartons and plastics from consumers and recycle them.
Amazon says it already collects, segregates and recycles over 100% of the volume of the packaging material its fulfilment centres create, by working with third-party vendors.
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