In One British Warehouse, Amazon Is Destroying Over a Hundred Thousand Items a Week ⇥ itv.com

Richard Pallot, ITV News:

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’.

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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.

To be clear, this is just one Amazon warehouse. Amazon says it has 185 of them around the world. I would be careful not to extrapolate directly, but it seems likely to me that millions of items are being destroyed every single week around the world. This is certainly not a solely Amazon problem, but this story reveals a staggering amount of needless waste and destruction, incentivized by the company’s policies, our ruinous buying habits, and fast shipping expectations.