An Amazon warehouse in Scotland destroys millions of unsold products every year, an investigation from the British news outlet ITV found. ITV filmed u

One Amazon warehouse destroys 130,000 items per week, including MacBooks, COVID-19 masks, and TVs, some of them new and unused, a report says

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-22 19:00:06

An Amazon warehouse in Scotland destroys millions of unsold products every year, an investigation from the British news outlet ITV found.

ITV filmed undercover footage inside Amazon's warehouse in Dunfermline, Scotland. The footage showed laptops, TVs, jewelry, headphones, books, and face masks being loaded into crates marked "destroy."

An anonymous former Amazon employee told ITV that workers at the warehouse were given a weekly target of 130,000 items to destroy. This was corroborated by an internal memo viewed by ITV, which showed that during one week in April, 124,000 items were marked "destroy."

"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," the ex-employee told ITV. About half of the items marked for destruction were still in their shrink-wrap, while the other half were returned items in good condition, they said.

If 130,000 is a weekly average, that would translate to more than 6 million products marked for destruction every year. In 2019, undercover reporters in France found that Amazon destroyed over 3 million products in one year.