Skip to main content

Amazon reportedly destroys millions of perfectly fine gadgets every year

An undercover investigation by ITV News has revealed that Amazon is sending millions of laptops, smartphones, Bluetooth speakers, and even face masks every year to landfills and recycling centres. 

The news website shows recorded footage from one of 175 warehouses that Amazon operates across the world where unsold goods are being marked for destruction and being dispatched in trucks. A former employee further reveals that the target of this centre located in Dunfermline, Scotland alone was to destroy 130,000 items per week or 6 million products every year.

Amazon is also donating a measly portion of the unsold inventory. For every 130,000 items sent for destruction, around 28,000 were marked for donation. 

Also Read: What if a botched Google search card says you are a serial killer?

“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,” the employee further revealed. 

The explanation for this scandalous practice is that after a product becomes obsolete, it’s cheaper to destroy it rather than to store it in the warehouse. ITV news notes that what Amazon is doing isn’t exactly illegal. 

“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,” said an Amazon spokesperson in response to the allegations.

Also Read: 

This isn’t the first time Amazon has been pointed out for destroying perfectly good inventory. An undercover investigation in 2019 revealed that the company destroyed 3 million products in France that year. 

The new investigation has elicited interest from many activists and politicians in the U.K. Even Prime Minister Boris Johnson has promised to look into the allegations.

Source



from General News https://ift.tt/3qo3jTA
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Apple Seeds iOS 18.5 Developer Beta 3 Update for iPhone; Public Beta 2 Also Released

Apple on Monday rolled out the iOS 18.5 Developer Beta 3 update to developers and beta testers. It arrives as a minor update for the iPhone with similar features in tow. Alongside, it bundles fixes for a bug that caused black screen to appear on the new Apple Vision Pro. Apple also seeded the iOS 18.5 Public Beta 2 update with a handful of changes compared to the publ... from Gadgets 360 https://ift.tt/ZGYOJvf
Post a Comment
Read more

What if a botched Google search card says you are a serial killer

Many of us have come to heavily rely on Google Search and often don’t question the veracity of information Google cherry-picks from the vast data available on the world wide web for its search cards. This incident, which is one part funny and two parts scary, makes it clear that Google’s Knowlege Graph may not be as sacrosanct as you may have believed.  Hristo Georgiev was informed by a former colleague that a Google search of his name returned a Google Knowlege Graph that depicted his photo and linked it to a Bulgarian rapist and serial killer of the same name, also known as ‘The Sadist’, who murdered five people back in the 1970s and was later executed by shooting.  The graph linked the info to a Wikipedia article, which incidentally had no link to any of Georgiev’s profile or his image. It was Google’s algorithms that erroneously matched the two. What’s even more problematic is that Hristo Georgiev is not a unique name and is shared by hundreds of other people.  As...
Post a Comment
Read more