You know those little plastic airbags in your most fragile Amazon purchases that make the perfect popping noise when crushed? Amazon says it has reduced its use and plans to completely phase out its use by the end of the year.
The e-commerce giant announced on They reduced the use of plastic airbags by 95 percent and switched to crumbled paper filling instead. Amazon also says it plans to use paper stuffing in nearly all of its customer deliveries .
The company says that its decision to phase out the use of plastic airbags in its distribution centers aims to eliminate unnecessary waste and focus more on the use of recycled materials.
Plastic pollution has always been a concern when it comes to our environment but it has increased dramatically as a result of Amazon’s rapid rise especially during the Covid pandemic. Nonprofit ocean conservation group It released a study in 2021 showing that Amazon generated 599 million pounds of plastic waste in 2020. The group also estimated that waste from plastic airbags alone “would orbit the Earth more than 600 times.”