December 12, 2024
Amazon Ditches Plastic Air Pillows in North America
BY: Emily Nuñez
In a major victory for Oceana and the oceans, the world’s largest e-commerce company moves away from plastic packaging
For years, Amazon delivered packages with a side of plastic waste. At the company’s fulfillment centers, plastic pillows were filled with air to cushion purchases in cardboard boxes. Those packages were then shipped to the company’s huge customer base — a reported 180 million Americans are currently Amazon Prime members.
Air pillows are made from flexible plastic film, a type of plastic not accepted, as Amazon itself has noted, by most municipal curbside recycling programs in the United States. Instead, when plastic film is thrown away, it often ends up in landfills or in the environment, including the oceans, where it can injure and kill marine life. In studies of 80 marine species that died after ingesting a variety of plastic debris, flexible plastic proved to be the deadliest kind.
Oceana and its allies have been campaigning for four years to get Amazon to reduce plastic packaging, including air pillows, and in June, the company took action. Amazon announced that, for packages delivered in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, it had replaced 95% of its plastic air pillows with filler made entirely from recycled paper. Amazon said it would phase out the remaining 5% of air pillows by the end of 2024 and also committed to an even broader “multi-year effort to remove plastic delivery packaging from North America fulfillment centers.”
Amazon’s move away from plastic air pillows in North America follows the company phasing out plastic air pillows in Australia, and nearly all single-use plastic packaging (including air pillows) in India and throughout Europe.
Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, says that according to the company’s most recent sustainability report, the U.S. and Canada accounted for more than 94% of Amazon’s global plastic packaging use in 2023. And “protective” packaging, including air pillows, accounted for about a third of all e-commerce plastic packaging used in 2022.
Amazon announced that its decision meant it was eliminating a total of 15 billion air pillows annually. “That’s great news for the oceans,” Littlejohn adds. “An enormous amount of plastic, a type that is especially devastating to marine life, will be replaced.”
Exposing Amazon’s plastic problem
Oceana launched its campaign in 2020, just after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amazon sales and orders were growing exponentially as customers flocked online to shop. “We knew this plastic was a problem for the oceans and felt like Amazon was a company that could fix it,” Littlejohn says.
At first, Oceana appealed directly to Amazon’s customers, urging them to ask the company for a plastic-free packaging option at checkout. A petition, led by Oceana supporter Nicole Delma, garnered over 780,000 signatures.
Because Amazon’s sustainability reports did not disclose information about its plastic packaging use, Oceana took a different tactic and began to estimate the company’s plastic footprint, calculating how much of that plastic was potentially polluting the world’s waterways and seas.
Oceana’s first report about the company’s plastic packaging footprint was released in December 2020 and relied on a mix of peer-reviewed research and e-commerce packaging data to estimate the amount of plastic packaging that Amazon used in a year, as well as the share of waste that was likely to become marine plastic pollution and the impact of plastic on marine life. The report also called on the company to use its well-known innovative capabilities to move away from plastic packaging.
The first report estimated that up to 22.4 million pounds of Amazon’s plastic packaging polluted the world’s freshwater and marine ecosystems in 2019 — the equivalent of dumping a delivery van’s worth of plastic into the world’s waterways and oceans every 70 minutes. When national media outlets started covering Oceana’s report, Amazon disputed the estimate but refused to release data backing its claim. Oceana noted Amazon’s statement about the estimate and called for the company to make its own data publicly available (and offered to use that data in future reports).
Dr. Dana Miller, Oceana’s Director of Strategic Initiatives, says, “We used science and the best available information for our reports and shared our estimates with the company. The company’s public response to the report and refusal to share its own numbers was key because it ultimately drove more media coverage and raised the question — why was Amazon refusing to be transparent about its plastic use?”
A winning strategy
Oceana’s campaign hit an early milestone in November 2021 when Amazon announced it would replace single-use plastic packaging with paper and cardboard in Germany, one of the company’s largest markets. In addition to pressuring company executives to make these kinds of changes around the world, Oceana began directly connecting with Amazon investors and employees, many of whom were also company shareholders, and called on them to push the company to commit to plastic reductions.
Ahead of Amazon’s annual meeting in May 2022, Oceana sent a letter that urged shareholders to support a resolution, filed by Oceana ally As You Sow, calling on the company to reduce its plastic footprint by one-third. Outside Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle, Washington, Oceana canvassed and created mobile billboards, yard signs, chalk graffiti, and street posters. “We made the company’s ‘plastic problem’ and the resolution an issue for employees and shareholders,” adds Littlejohn. When it came time to vote, the results were surprising. The resolution received 48% of the support of company shareholders, exceeding expectations and nearly passing.
“We almost won outright, which had never happened before in Amazon history,” Littlejohn says. “It was clear we were on to something.”
Oceana released reports on an annual basis, with new estimates of the company’s plastic footprint, to ramp up the pressure. By the time Oceana got ready to release its third report in December 2022, Amazon, now in regular communication with Oceana, asked for a meeting and told Oceana that it was going to release a statement disclosing its plastic use.
“This new transparency was so important,” adds Miller. “The company disclosure — which came directly in response to our reports — really set the stage because Amazon was now publicly accountable for its plastic packaging footprint.”
Then, in November 2023, Amazon announced it had completed a dramatic transition away from plastic packaging in Europe. Earlier that year, the company disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its total plastic use for packages shipped from company fulfillment centers had declined by 11.6% from 2021 to 2022.
“We know that our campaign and reports played an important role in this change,” Miller says of Amazon’s decision to act in Europe and decrease its plastic packaging use. “But because the markets in Europe are not nearly as large as
the U.S., it was also easier for the company to make changes there. The key to the overall victory was getting the company to do the same in North America, which accounted for 94% of Amazon’s total plastic packaging use in 2023, according to the company’s most recent sustainability report.”
Oceana knew that Amazon had the ability to reduce plastic packaging in North America and continued to push new reports, shareholder resolutions, and other actions until change finally happened.
Littlejohn credits the “Oceana model” — along with the support of Oceana’s allies — for the campaign’s ultimate success. Oceana used data and science to write its Amazon reports, then leaned on its communications team to secure media coverage. At the grassroots and advocacy levels, Oceana engaged with Amazon customers and employees, campaigned outside of the company’s offices in Seattle, and repeatedly met with executives to make a case for plastic reductions.
Change is possible
Oceana is now monitoring Amazon’s public reports to make sure it completely phases out plastic air pillows and transitions away from plastic packaging in its North American operations. “The company could stretch its impact further by pivoting to reusable packaging in all of its markets,” says Miller. “This would reduce single-use packaging that has a short life span but long-term environmental consequence.”
As Oceana looks to the future, it’s applying some of the lessons learned from its Amazon campaign to a different corporate target: The Coca-Cola Company. Oceana launched a campaign in 2020 against this company to move away from single-use plastic packaging and towards reusable beverage containers. Coca-Cola is the number one plastic polluter in the world, according to the Break Free From Plastic Brand Audit. In 2022, the global beverage maker committed to making a quarter of its packaging reusable by 2030 — a move that, by Oceana’s estimates, would avoid producing the equivalent of over 100 billion 500ml single-use plastic bottles and cups.
While this would significantly reduce plastic pollution, Coca- Cola has not made any progress toward that goal. In 2023, the company’s reusable packaging stood at 14% for its total beverage volume, unchanged from 2022. Oceana is now pushing Coca-Cola to come up with a plan to meet its commitment.
“Coca-Cola will eventually also reduce their use of plastic packaging. They have to — our oceans are being inundated with plastic,” Miller says. “We will be persistent in pushing the company for change because we know they can do it, just as Amazon has.”
Miller explained that Amazon’s ability to quickly pivot from plastic air pillows to recycled paper filler shows what large companies can achieve. In just eight months, the company went from announcing that it would be testing paper packaging alternatives at a fulfillment center in Euclid, Ohio, to actually rolling out those changes across North America.
If Amazon can make these changes so quickly, then Coca-Cola can too, Miller said. “The most exciting thing about being a part of Oceana’s Amazon campaign is the realization that, even with a small team, you can move a company this big and powerful to do the right thing if you have strong arguments and tactics, focus on the right decision-makers, and are backed by science,” Miller said. “It was possible for them to change their packaging strategy quickly, and they have shown others change is possible, too.”
