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Amazon shipping center: switch to paper
Photo: Maja Hitij / Getty Images
Online retailer Amazon wants to largely dispense with plastic packaging for shipping.
This applies both to the products sold on their own account and to the external dealers who use the shipping service of the US group in Germany.
The conversion should be completed by the end of the year, as the German Amazon headquarters announced on Monday.
Smaller deliveries should be made in paper-based shipping bags and envelopes, only larger items in corrugated cardboard boxes.
In recent years, environmental organizations have accused Amazon of producing too much plastic waste with its packaging and of being jointly responsible for the pollution of the oceans.
According to an analysis by the Cologne retail institute EHI 2020, the company was by far the market leader in German online mail order - ahead of Otto and Zalando.
According to the announcement, Amazon now wants to make packaging more sustainable by using as large a proportion of easily recyclable materials as possible.
However, plastic packaging is not banned completely.
One of the possible exceptions concerns bubble wrap for fragile items like glass.
If manufacturers deliver their products in »suitable one-way plastic bags«, Amazon also wants to use these bags for onward shipping.
Nevertheless, it should not be expected that Amazon will become the darling of environmentalists by largely doing without plastic packaging.
The problems associated with shipping goods with a large number of small vans for the air and city centers are still unsolved.
The handling of returns also remains a point of criticism.
mik / dpa-AFX