By Chris Conway Senior staff editor, Opinion |
I've been in the Florida Keys this past week and got up early one morning to go for a walk along the beach at Curry Hammock State Park. The water was calm and the bird life abundant. In short order, I spotted a great blue heron, a white ibis and a pair of brown pelicans. Sandpipers scurried ahead of me. |
I also saw a lot of plastic trash washed up on the beach and floating just beyond reach. Water and soda bottles, bottle tops, the ripped remains of plastic cups and other plastic detritus littered my path. |
As a senior staff editor in Opinion who focuses on Op-Eds about the environment, I've thought a lot about our intense reliance on plastic. Packaging for food and beverages remains a huge problem, but the boom in e-commerce worldwide has also led to an explosion in single-use plastic for shipping. |
Amazon alone sold more than 1.5 billion products during the 2020 holiday season. Think of all the single-use packaging that went into that shipping. It's head spinning. Just the other day, I watched as a neighbor in my building extracted a small item from the Amazon box she had just received. It was encased in multiple plastic pillows meant to safeguard the shipment. |
In an Op-Ed today, Pamela L. Geller and Christopher Parmeter, both associate professors at the University of Miami, train their lens on Amazon to examine the e-commerce plastics problem and the potential for solutions. |
As Pamela and Christopher make clear, Amazon, far and away the leader in online sales in the U.S., has a long way to go to address the problem. So does the e-commerce industry as a whole. |
Still, they note, the company has the brainpower to tackle the problem. And as "a sign of what is possible, Amazon says it has phased out single-use plastic packaging at its more than 50 fulfillment centers in India," they write. |
Given Amazon's size and reach, how it addresses this issue will reverberate across the e-commerce industry — and maybe even the next beach I visit in the Florida Keys. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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