Amazon created 599 million pounds of plastic packaging waste in 2020, 23.5 million pounds of which ended up in the world's oceans, watchdog report says

• Amazon produced just shy of 600 million pounds of plastic waste in 2020, a new Oceana report said.
• An estimated 23.5 million pounds of that plastic ended up in the world's oceans, according to the report.

In 2020, as more Americans than ever turned to Amazon amid COVID lockdowns, the company subsequently created more plastic plastic packaging waste than ever: 599 million pounds in total, according to a new Oceana report.

Of that nearly 600 million pounds of plastic, Oceana estimates that "up to 23.5 million pounds" entered the world's oceans. That's equivalent to "dumping a delivery van payload of plastic into the oceans every 67 minutes," the report said.

Oceana, which commissioned and published the report, is an international non-profit organization that's "dedicated to protecting and restoring the world's oceans on a global scale," the group's website said.

Amazon disputed the report in a statement sent to Insider.

"Their calculations are seriously flawed," the statement said. "They have overestimated our plastics usage by more than 300%, and use outdated assumptions about the sources of plastic waste entering our oceans."

The vast majority of the plastic entering the world's oceans comes from about 20 companies and doesn't include Amazon, according to the Plastic Waste Makers Index. Instead, petrochemical companies like ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical and Sinopec are responsible for that waste.

Just those three companies account for nearly 20% of the world's single-use plastic waste, according to the Index.

Rather than companies like Amazon, which use plastics for packaging, the Plastic Waste Makers Index points to the source of the world's single-use plastics: The companies that produce the polymers used to create single-use plastics.

Moreover, Amazon's reported contributions to plastic waste in the ocean account for a small fraction of the overall numbers. An estimated 17.6 billion pounds of new plastic enters the worlds oceans each year, the report said, compared with Amazon's 23.5 million pound contribution.

The Plastic Waste Makers Index posits that, if petrochemical companies produced less plastic, companies like Amazon that use single-use plastics would be forced to use something else.

Regardless, Amazon said in its statement that it's "making rapid progress in reducing or removing single-use plastics" from its packaging, and the company remains committed to "achieving net-zero carbon by 2040."

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