TL; DR
- Amazon announced two new programs to reduce waste after discovering numerous brand new products were destroyed.
- The new initiatives aim to give a second life to obsolete or unsold items.
Amazon has made plans to breathe new life into unsold products in its warehouses after a recent investigation found the e-commerce giant destroyed millions of brand new, flawless items like iPads, MacBooks, phones, televisions, and more due to Storage problems in one of its 24 UK camps.
Video evidence and interviews from ITV news showed that Amazon was scrapping around 130,000 such unsold items a week from just one location in the UK! When the worrying footage was released, speculation mounted that the company likely followed similar wasteful practices at its other warehouses around the world.
Now the backlash from lawmakers and environmental activists has prompted Amazon to launch two new programs to give unsold products a second life. The company announced the FBA Liquidation and FBA Grade and Resell programs to help businesses resell inventory returned or overfilled by customers.
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“These new programs are examples of the steps we are taking to ensure that products sold on Amazon – whether by us or our small business partners – are put to good use and not become waste,” said Libby Johnson McKee, Director, Amazon WW Returns, ReCommerce and Sustainability.
Sellers who want to resell returned items can list them on Amazon as “used” items. When an item is returned, sellers can set a new price and automatically submit it to that new program. The option is now available to sellers in the UK and will be available in the US by the end of the year and in Germany, France, Italy and Spain by early 2022.
The other FBA liquidation program gives sellers the ability to leverage Amazon’s wholesale channel and technology to recover a portion of their inventory costs from their returned or excess inventory. The program is now live in the US, Germany, France, Italy and Spain and is scheduled to go live in the UK in August.
Are these efforts enough to reduce Amazon’s alleged waste? We will only know in time. The company is committed to achieving zero net CO2 by 2040 and 100% renewable energy by 2025.
