Amazon says it ditched plastic air pillows

Amazon says that it has gotten escaped of integrative aerial pillows astatine its warehouses.

“As of October 2024, we’ve removed each integrative aerial pillows from our transportation packaging utilized astatine our planetary fulfillment centers,” the e-commerce elephantine said successful an October 9th blog post.

It’s a invited alteration pursuing years of unit from biology groups to halt integrative contamination flooding into oceans. The institution is inactive moving to trim the usage of single-use plastics much broadly successful its packaging.

“The information that the world’s largest e-commerce institution has made integrative aerial pillows past globally is fantastic quality for the world’s oceans,” Matt Littlejohn, elder vice president of strategical initiatives astatine the nonprofit Oceana, said successful a statement successful effect to Amazon’s announcement.

The astir prolific benignant of plastic litter adjacent coastlines is integrative movie — a worldly that makes up those erstwhile ubiquitous aerial pillows, according to Oceana. That movie besides happens to beryllium the “deadliest” benignant of integrative contamination for ample mammals similar whales and dolphins that mightiness ingest it, Oceana says.

Amazon’s announcement comes aft it pledged successful June to get escaped of integrative aerial pillows successful North America by the extremity of the year. The institution swapped retired integrative aerial pillows and single-use transportation bags for insubstantial and cardboard alternatives successful Europe successful 2022. It besides ditched integrative movie packaging astatine its facilities successful India successful 2020.

The US is Amazon’s largest market, and the institution hasn’t managed to afloat destruct integrative packaging successful North America conscionable yet. It says it plans to trim the magnitude of deliveries containing “Amazon-added integrative transportation packaging” successful North America to conscionable one-third of shipments by December, down from two-thirds successful December 2023.