The world’s largest retailer increased use of plastic packaging in the U.S. in 2022, despite the company reporting a decrease worldwide, according to a new report.
The report, published Thursday from the advocacy nonprofit Oceana, estimates Amazon’s plastic packaging waste for U.S. transactions alone totaled 208 million pounds in 2022, an increase of nearly 10 percent over 2021.
Last July, Amazon said it used about 189 million pounds of single-use plastic packaging to ship orders across the globe in 2022, an 11 percent decrease from the 214 million pounds it used in 2021.
But that number doesn’t paint the full picture, said Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s senior vice president for strategic initiatives, because it does not include packaging for products bought through Amazon’s affiliate merchants, the third-party sellers that use Amazon’s website to advertise products.
