The India unit of Amazon.com Inc has banned all single-use plastic across all centres in the country, following the target to remove the unnecessary packaging materials by June. The e-commerce giant spokesperson said in addition to replacing usual packaging materials like air pillows and bubble wraps with “paper cushions”, it has also swapped packaging tapes with the biodegradable options.
Amazon’s Vice President of Consumer Fulfillment for APAC, LATAM, North Africa and Middle East regions Akhil Saxena said that the company succeeded in eliminating single-use plastic in all of their fulfillment centers to 100%. The company, often criticized over the years for using too much plastic and other packaging like thermocool to wrap its billions of shipment packages, finally said last September that their India units would replace all single-plastic use for packaging by June 2020. Saxena said though pandemic made their work slowing down, Amazon India still managed to meet the elimination project target even before the national lockdown was imposed.
Prime Minister Modi spoke to the citizens to help reduce and end the usage of single-use plastic by 2022 as it was considered a pollutant. The 1.3 billion resident South Asian country does not have an organized system for plastic waste management, and the wide usage of it leads to extensive littering. Many Indian populated cities are ranked among the world's most polluted, one of the main pollutants is single use plastic. Walmart Inc e-commerce India unit, Flipkart, a local Amazon rival, also announced last month that they had cut down the plastic packaging usage to around 50%.
