Western Morning News (Saturday)
Dumped items could change lives of others
I’VE long been concerned about the in-built obsolescence of items. Go to any council tip and you’ll see piles of items that look perfectly ok but are on the scrap heap because parts are unavailable.
Over the years it’s been so much easier to ditch and replace rather than mend. How many kettles or toasters have you got through in the last 20 years? I can remember my dad welding our kettle. Now I know that might be extreme or uneconomic to repair, but things were made to last and generally did.
Recently the government introduced rules ensuring manufacturers would be, for the first time, required to make spare parts – helping to extend the lifespan of products by up to 10 years.
It’s a start. But it’s almost as though we live in a parallel universe. Last month Amazon were shown by an ITV investigation to be sending tens of thousands of new goods to landfill. Do you remember, during lockdown when schools were crying out for laptops? Well Amazon were apparently chucking thousands of them away, along with TV’s, books and other perfectly working items. This is supposedly happening every week. Dyson vacuums? iPads, Macbooks? All wantonly destroyed. Even unused face masks, desperately needed to keep people safe from Covid.
As a report by Greenpeace says, “The revelations make a mockery of Amazon’s claims that it’s committed to being a zero-waste organisation”.
According to the ITV documentary, based on leaked information, in April alone, in just one UK warehouse, more than 130,000 items were marked to destroy. Only 28,000 items in the same time frame were labelled “donate”.
This is just one warehouse in the
UK, so it’s breath-taking to think of the final numbers world-wide. OK, so they give away a small portion of items, but it’s not enough. Destruction is part of some Amazon employers work, with one employee saying “I reckon 70% of what we put in bins is sealed and in its packaging.”
Amazon, it seems are not alone. Shockingly companies across the world are dumping things that could change the lives for others. In New York there’s a woman known as ‘The trash Walker’. Anna Sacks, 30, is a feisty environmental activist who, since 2018 has been foraging around rubbish on the city streets, shocking people with her finds on her social media channels on what she calls her “trash walks”. On her walkabouts she showcases just a fraction of the usable clothing, food and housewares that get thrown out daily. She shines a light on the shame and indignity of producing so much waste.
The employees of a number of retail companies ask their employees, themselves on low income, to destroy goods or food that they might want or need but not be able to afford.
“Why not give away unsold or lightly used return but still good items to low wage employees as an ‘added perk’” says Sacks. Rather than the goods being dumped.
Sacks wants to see bold legislation making businesses donate unsold or unused goods. “But it needs to be made law or it won’t happen” she says.
Sacks Instagram and TikTok pages are amassing millions of views as people learn of the finds she comes across on her regular walks. Canned goods, toys, new cosmetics, furniture, Tiffany glassware, Le Creuset casseroles, much of it dumped by stores. One employee of an office furniture company told how he was instructed to slash the seats before putting them in a street skip. Another
It seems it’s because businesses like Amazon work on a model built on greed and speed
scene showed Sacks with hundreds of Twix, Snickers and more dumped by a shop, along with oneday-over-sell-by-date toothpaste, which had been squeezed over the bars to stop anyone taking them.
Sacks, an ex-investment banker, is exposing New York’s decadent excesses by exhuming mountains of perfectly salvageable food and other good from rubbish bins. And if you think this is confined to New York, how wrong you would be. The situation is the same in the UK, and it seems it’s because businesses like Amazon work on a model built on greed and speed.
Often items are discarded because, according to Greenpeace “shelf space in warehouses becomes more valuable than the items themselves. And the quicker items can be sold or destroyed the quicker it can make space for more products – and the higher the companies profits.
It’s well known that Amazon isn’t paying its fair share of taxes. Again, as Greenpeace says “these taxes are sorely needed for the safe disposal of waste, which in itself can be complex and environmentally damaging. And over production is wreaking havoc on our environment too – tech items contain dozens of rare and precious metals so higher demand means child labour is used and ecosystems destroyed.”
So next time you order, think twice. Returning items might just go to landfill. Maybe just give them straight to charity or leave them outside your front door for someone to take away and use. Take a leaf from Sacks’ book. Don your gardening gloves and poke around bins around stores. You have no idea what you might find. Take pictures and send them in to the Western Morning News and let us do the naming and shaming – for the sake of the planet.