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Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses every year

Kaeden

Kaeden

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Oct 25, 2017
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I hate to say I wasn't exactly surprised when I saw this but seeing the video at the link below really put into perspective just how much stuff they're literally taking to landfills to get rid of. How do they not have a method in place to donate at least some of this? Maybe they do and this is just above and beyond that? Who knows... either way this is pretty damn bad and I imagine it's only gonna get worse as they continue to grow.

Undercover filming from inside Amazon's Dunfermline warehouse reveals the sheer scale of the waste: Smart TVs, laptops, drones, hairdryers, top of the range headphones, computer drives, books galore, thousands of sealed face masks – all sorted into boxes marked "destroy".

Products that were never sold, or returned by a customer. Almost all could have been redistributed to charities or those in need. Instead, they are thrown into vast bins, carried away by lorries (which we tracked), and dumped at either recycling centres or, worse, a landfill site.

An ex-employee, who asked for anonymity, told us: "From a Friday to a Friday our target was to generally destroy 130,000 items a week."I used to gasp. There's no rhyme or reason to what gets destroyed: Dyson fans, Hoovers, the occasional MacBook and iPad; the other day, 20,000 Covid (face) masks still in their wrappers.
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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'.The same manager admitted to us that in some weeks, as many as 200,000 items could be marked 'destroy'.

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.
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Undercover video and more at links below, along with Amazon's response, which in short is: ""We are working towards a goal of zero product disposal and our priority is to resell, donate to charitable organisations or recycle any unsold products. No items are sent to landfill in the UK. As a last resort, we will send items to energy recovery, but we're working hard to drive the number of times this happens down to zero."

www.itv.com

Revealed: Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in UK every year | ITV News

An ITV News investigation has uncovered the sheer scale of waste at one of Amazon's UK warehouses, with TVs and laptops among the items being thrown away. | ITV National News
www.itv.com www.itv.com
 
chefbags

chefbags

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Oct 25, 2017
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Yea this is a thing i noticed when i used to work at the warehouses. Just really big boxes of stuff full of unopened shit and it just ready to be destroyed. Thought that shit was a waste.
 
Annubis

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Oct 25, 2017
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Same thing as most grocery stores: If you can't sell it, destroy it. Don't ever give it away.
 
FliX

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Kaeden

Kaeden

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Annubis said:
Same thing as most grocery stores: If you can't sell it, destroy it. Don't ever give it away.
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Saw a story about this at a local grocery store and how someone had captured pictures of unsold bakery items like cakes, breads, cookies, etc and ended up being packaged containers that were actually being donated. Was happy to see that but I have to believe many things do in fact just get discarded entirely.
 
Annubis

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Kadin said:
Saw a story about this at a local grocery store and how someone had captured pictures of unsold bakery items like cakes, breads, cookies, etc and ended up being packaged containers that were actually being donated. Was happy to see that but I have to believe many things do in fact just get discarded entirely.
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Worked in the back of groceries for most of my teenage years and it might be better nowadays, but back then, it was all going straight to the trash.
We even locked the trash.
 
blame space

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scarcity is not a problem in first world countries. supply and demand only applies in favor of the supplier.
 
Shiz Padoo

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Why not sell it for a nominal fee and at least make some money? If someone can spend $2 on a Multitap they don't need, others will do the same at Amazon.
 
Temtastic Muns

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Is it true that all returned merchandise effectively gets trashed and destroyed as well? Thought I had heard that from somewhere.
 
Curler

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Most retailers do this, not many know about it unless they work there, and it sucks. I still remember at Gamestop finding out how much stuff gets destroyed when it got pennied out and how much of a waste it was (I helped save some stuff cause screw more garbage :/) Doesn't help when corporate told a ton of districts to just throw out DS/PS2/etc. cases to save space, only to fill up garbages more :/

I hate it, and hate it when food places do it even MORE. Just donate the stuff, get a write off if you really want something back from your loss.


Meus Renaissance said:
Why? Why is it harmful to the business to give these away?
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Money loss + something about some homeless guy suing some place once from getting sick from the tossed out food, and they don't want a lawsuit over it.
 
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Kaeden

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Temtastic Muns said:
Is it true that all returned merchandise effectively gets trashed and destroyed as well? Thought I had heard that from somewhere.
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It seems from what I recall in the past, often it's just cheaper for them to just get rid of it instead of dealing with taking it back and doing whatever they have to do to resell it. I know with some retailers, like the late Fry's (RIP), they would just tape up returns and take off like 10% and put it back on the shelves. But stuff being sent back to the manufacturer? Not sure.
 
Xun

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Oct 25, 2017
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Unsurprising.

I still feel guilty by buying the wrong SD card a while back and sending it back to Amazon.

I'd like to think it was resold since it was unopened, but unfortunately I find that doubtful.

Such a waste.
 
DBT85

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Not new. My dad got a TV many years ago that was moments from having a slege hammer put through it for no reason other than being unsold. It's ridiculous.
 
Curler

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Dark Ninja said:
Lawsuits. Reason why food places tell employees explicitly to never give anything away. If someone gets sick the company is liable. Even if it isn't an edible item the company could still get sued for anything.
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I honestly wish they just made waivers or something to try and get around the fear of a lawsuit :/ "Eat at your own risk, we aren't responsible" or something.
 
Teh_Lurv

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Meus Renaissance said:
Why? Why is it harmful to the business to give these away?
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Dark Ninja said:
Lawsuits. Reason why food places tell employees explicitly to never give anything away. If someone gets sick the company is liable. Even if it isn't an edible item the company could still get sued for anything.
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I could've sworn a John Oliver segment on food waste mentioned that this is a misconception; you can't be held liable if someone get sick if you donated the food in good faith.

For non-food items, I recall hearing many clothing brands don't want to see their unsold clothes donated to charity. It's a bad image for poor/homeless people walking around in new designer clothing.
 
anthro

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Shodan14 said:
This is the production lines literally being so efficient that it's cheaper to throw stuff away rather than try to sell them though.
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It's productive efficiency in terms of product per labor hour for what is produced, but not necessarily distributional efficiency by normative standards that don't prioritize a vague pursuit of productive efficiency without addressing what it is producing for.
 
Shodan14

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anthro said:
It's productive efficiency in terms of product per labor hour for what is produced, but not necessarily distributional efficiency by normative standards that don't prioritize a vague pursuit of productive efficiency without addressing what it is producing for.
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That's where regulation comes in!
 
mentok15

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Apharmd said:
Capitalism is the most efficient economic system at allocating goods and services.
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You're confusing the market with capitalism (you can have anarchism/socialism with free markets) and what is meant by most efficient. It basically means in a perfect market you cant make someone better off without making someone else worse off. And it's a positive statement, not normative.
 
MonoStable

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I think there are companies that will buy that stuff and resell it but the problem is a lot of it is just junk that will never sell.
 
Shiloh

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Worked in a produce warehouse. The amount of food by the pallet-full that would get thrown out is insane.
 
DBT85

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MonoStable said:
I think there are companies that will buy that stuff and resell it but the problem is a lot of it is just junk that will never sell.
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It's not that it'll never sell. It just won't sell at that price. They'd rather destroy it than sell at half the price so that it doesn't cannibalise future sales.
 

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Shodan14 said:
This is the production lines literally being so efficient that it's cheaper to throw stuff away rather than try to sell them though.
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I would argue that mass overproduction and waste isn't really very efficient, and beyond that you are polluting twice over, once during production and then during destruction and disposal.
 
Dyle

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Shiz Padoo said:
Why not sell it for a nominal fee and at least make some money? If someone can spend $2 on a Multitap they don't need, others will do the same at Amazon.
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It takes way more time and effort to do that than what they'd make back, they make more money by just tossing it all out.
 
Shodan14

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Apharmd said:
I would argue that mass overproduction and waste isn't really very efficient, and beyond that you are polluting twice over, once during production and then during destruction and disposal.
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Not efficient in terms of pollution or material used. Efficient in terms of the cost of making them.

I'm all for legislation against forced obsolescence, the right to repair and forcing companies to make quality things in general.
 
Gigi A

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Yeah, as someone who used to work at Amazon, it's extremely wild to see everything that they trash on the daily for things that are completely brand new as well. Everything has to be trashed and can't be taken home lmao It's bad

Xun said:
Unsurprising.

I still feel guilty by buying the wrong SD card a while back and sending it back to Amazon.

I'd like to think it was resold since it was unopened, but unfortunately I find that doubtful.

Such a waste.
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They trash returns.
 
Curler

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Batty~ said:
Yeah, as someone who used to work at Amazon, it's extremely wild to see everything that they trash on the daily for things that are completely brand new as well. Everything has to be trashed and can't be taken home lmao It's bad



They trash returns.
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What stuff gets sent to Amazon Warehouse then, since those are returns of varying conditions?
 
anthro

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Dyle said:
It takes way more time and effort to do that than what they'd make back, they make more money by just tossing it all out.
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Ideally they could just put it on the curb and people could take it. But they're probably afraid it would cause trouble, people would refrain from buying something before they could check if it had gotten thrown out one day, or products would get resold at fractions of their cost in other markets and compete with products that are still up for sale.
 
Sparkedglory2

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Yeah it's bs. The grocery store I used to work at did the same thing. They threw perfectly good food away because it couldn't be sold.
There are a few places I've seen that do donate goods that can't be sold anymore
 
Tavernade

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Early on in my retail career I was told that this was a tax thing: that companies could write off waste easier than they could with donations or marking it down excessively. If true it's still a shitty thing to do but we clearly need to fix whatever law/code/whatever allows it.

A lot of stuff got thrown out this past year due to COVID shutting down or slowing down donation centres my company used.
 
Curler

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Tavernade said:
Early on in my retail career I was told that this was a tax thing: that companies could write off waste easier than they could with donations or marking it down excessively. If true it's still a shitty thing to do but we clearly need to fix whatever law/code/whatever allows it.

A lot of stuff got thrown out this past year due to COVID shutting down or slowing down donation centres my company used.
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COVID definitely brought back a lot more waste, especially with no one taking a chance with surface area contamination and reusable bags getting banned, and a lot more takeout plastic bags/utensils/etc being used :/

As for the tax thing, there is soooooo much that needs to be fixing with those codes, and this is just one more thing to add to the pile. Writing off waste > donating baffles me how this could earn you MORE :/
 
Tavernade

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Curler said:
COVID definitely brought back a lot more waste, especially with no one taking a chance with surface area contamination and reusable bags getting banned, and a lot more takeout plastic bags/utensils/etc being used :/

As for the tax thing, there is soooooo much that needs to be fixing with those codes, and this is just one more thing to add to the pile. Writing off waste > donating baffles me how this could earn you MORE :/
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If the tax thing is true it's doubly baffling because, like… just give companies a slightly bigger credit for donating than tossing and you're good to go. I'm sure it's not as simple as that but there's no practical reason for it to be the way it is. Companies will do whatever gets them the most money.
 
Spacejaws

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Curler said:
I honestly wish they just made waivers or something to try and get around the fear of a lawsuit :/ "Eat at your own risk, we aren't responsible" or something.
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I think some places do now. My wife works at a chain restuarant that donates food and the charities have to sign a disclaimer that says that the restaurant is not liable for disease or death due to the food. They sign it everytime they pick it up.
 
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