Amazon and Walmart's Flipkart Pledge To Scrap Single-Use Plastic Packaging in India (techcrunch.com) 16
Amazon India and Walmart's Flipkart, two of the largest e-commerce businesses in India, have pledged to curb the usage of single-use plastic in their packaging in the country as they move to help New Delhi fight its ongoing battle with environmental pollution. From a report: Amazon said on Wednesday it will replace all single-use plastic in its packaging by June 2020 with paper cushions. The move follows Flipkart's announcement last week when it said it had already cut its reliance on single-use plastic by 25% and intended to move entirely to recycled plastic consumption in its supply chain by March 2021. Amazon said it will use paper cushions to replace plastic dunnage like air pillows and bubble wraps across its fulfillment centers in India. India generates nearly 26,000 tonnes of plastic waste every day, which makes it the 15th biggest plastic polluter globally.
Amazon (Score:2)
My local recycling center (in Canada) doesn't accept plastic sheets/bags/pillows anymore since they can't find any buyer for it. So paper cushions would be good everywhere in the world if you ask me.
Well done India (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Rankings:
China
Indonesia
Philippines
Vietnam
Sri Lanka
Thailand
Egypt
Malaysia
Nigeria
Bangladesh
South Africa
India
Algeria
Turkey
Pakistan
Brazil
Burma
Morocco
North Korea
United States
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We swear we'll try to do worst next time!
Signed,
Canada.
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That will give you interactive maps for total Per Capita and Total per Country.
But wait, keep scrolling down to this ourworldindata.org [ourworldindata.org]
Now you see the same results as before, as they account for all the plastic that is diverted from ending up in the environment the numbers significantly change.
Not sustainable (Score:2)
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I wonder the same thing. Such an incredibly large amounts of packaging, even just the stuff I buy. I have about 3-4 times more recycling than I do general trash.
And to think that next to none of it is actually recycled.
You know what they do with a lot of the glass? They crush it up and spread it over the top of landfills.
They used to send all of the plastic to China , but China doesn't want it anymore. So now its just sitting around , and apparently making it's way into the oceans.
Cardboard and paper?
Bad assumption. (Score:3)
Idiot article is idiotic.
India generates nearly 26,000 tonnes of plastic waste every day, which makes it the 15th biggest plastic polluter globally.
No, it makes it second in the world. The top ten plastic polluted rivers in the world are, in order, the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow (Huang He); Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; Nile; and Niger rivers. The Yangtze, Huang He, Hai He, and Pearl rivers are in China. The Amur river is in Russia and China. The Mekong river is in Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The Nile river runs through Sudan and Egypt. The Niger river runs through Mali, Nigeria, Niger, Benin, and Guinea. The Indus and the Ganges are in India.
China is worst, with five of the top 10 most plastic polluted rivers. (And probably most polluted with any substance.) India is second, with the second and sixth most plastic polluted rivers. The remaining three rivers get their pollution from multiple small countries, so none of them are individually highly ranked in pollution rate.
These pollution (trash) rates are enabled by plastic use rates, but not even remotely correlated with use rates. The efficacy of trash control in a country is independent of all use rates of anything, nevermind plastic. Some cultures don't like uncontrolled trash. Others do not care. China has begun cleaning up, though they have a long way to go. India set up the Namami Gange project, which according to their own auditors has done literally nothing. Odds are India will be the number one ocean polluter in less than a decade as China decides to care about their trash and India doesn't.
Will this effort by Amazon and Flipkart matter? No. Estimates of Indian retail sales vary wildly, depending on how sales are categorized and the details of the model being used to estimate the number of unreported (and hence untaxed) sales, but the value is not less than $600 billion USD and a reasonable estimate is $1,824 trillion USD in 2018. (Multiply by a factor of 72 for estimated value in rupees.) All e-commerce in India in 2018 was worth $38.5 billion. Amazon and Flipkart are the top two, accounting for roughly equal shares of the market, at 30% each. Paytm Mall is apparently the third largest, followed by a gaggle of wannabes. So Amazon and Flipkart between them will affect ~1.4% of Indian retail sales.
This is a meaningless gesture.
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It's really a shame that journalism is exclusively the domain of the dumb kids these days. They're trying to tell us about our world, and failing miserably because they're literally too stupid to understand it. And are also bad at journalism. A mediocre journalist would have at least googled to see if that sentence was correct instead of jumping to their own completely unwarranted conclusion based on their own ignorant guess. A good journalist would have found the study in PLOS One from the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research, read the paper, understood the paper, and correctly quoted the paper, with citation.
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You seem to have left off the Citarum River [austroindo...rogram.org] in Indonesia from your list.
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I do think that there are other more important steps that can be taken to deal with this particular prob
This is cool (Score:1)