No More Plastic taking matters into their own hands by challenging Jeff Bezoz, CEO of Amazon.
“Ocean is in danger. We are in danger. And we must act now, with your help, to serve the greater good of humanity and the world.”
Full disclosure, I’m a self-proclaimed Amazon addict with an Amazon Prime account despite the fact I spend most of my time in Asia where it’s of no use. But whenever I go to the US I place orders that very often hit in the 10s of items. But with that comes 10s of packages because Amazon likes to send things separately. The Verge estimated that a colossal 5 billion items were shipped through Prime in 2017 and if you consider that all of them arrive in boxes and most of them come wrapped in plastic, it’s easy to extrapolate that the billion-dollar Fortune 500 company is on one of the world’s worst offenders when it comes to churning out single-use plastic.
In January of this year, a non-profit organization (NGO) called No More Plastic had enough. The group penned a powerful open letter to Amazon CEO, Founder, and Chairman Jeff Bezos. In it, they began by reminding him that we are living in a critical time of unprecedented upheaval in the history of humanity and that with great power comes great responsibility. “You have more than anyone all the means and all the reasons to act,” they say.
Bezos, of course, possesses an extraordinary power and that exceeds that of most others. Thus the NGO call on him to reinvent the future of consumption by changing what consumers think is the “norm in the e-commerce industry (and beyond) when it comes to the delivery of plastic-wrapped retail products.”
Meanwhile, on their website, Amazon is even advertising that they use of single-use plastic when packaging items.
With more than 300 million customers globally, No More Plastic believe that Amazon can help change the world by eradicating plastic packaging to create a new standard in the domain of e-commerce and ceasing to be the world’s leading plastic packaging distribution platform. “There can be no customer care without human caring,” they wrote in the letter.
Read the full letter here and if you’d like to further encourage Amazon to lead by example, sign the petition here.