Amazon Slammed for Destroying As-New and Returned Goods (fortune.com)

Amazon is destroying "massive amounts" of as-new and returned items, raising the ire of the German government and environmental campaigners, local media reported. Fortune: The types of items being destroyed here go way beyond the "health and personal care" products that Amazon has long been destroying when people return them, for sanitary reasons. We're talking things like washing machines, smartphones and furniture. The revelation drew an angry response from the German government and environmental campaigners. "This is a huge scandal," Jochen Flasbarth from the German environment ministry told WirtschaftsWoche. "We are consuming these resources despite all the problems in the world. This approach is not in step with our times." Greenpeace's Kirsten Brodde said there was a need for a new "law on banning the waste and destruction of first-hand and usable goods."

Comments

Re:It's about cost...

[Joce640k]

No, I want Amazon to accept the consequences of their business model.

If it costs them extra to de-louse everything and do a factory reset on every returned smartphone then that's too bad.

All it means is that the prices charged by Amazon will resemble more closely the true costs of doing business in that way.

Re:It's about cost...

[hey!]

I once volunteered for a group which tidied up and fixed used furniture and housewares and provided them to poor families.

The economics of that was interesting. I once fixed an old Singer sewing machine that had frozen up because the old oil had congealed. Now if you paid me what my time was worth as an engineer that'd make no sense: you could buy a new one for that. But in fact I wasn't paid in money. The next week a family came in and the mom knew how to sew. When I loaded the sewing machine on the van I had the satisfaction of seeing something I'd fixed with my own hands go where it would mean clothes for the kids.

Sometimes we got antiques or other pieces that were valuable. These went to auctions and the proceeds bought re-manufactured mattresses. Other times we got stuff that was just trash; this went into the dumpster, or if it were metal to a scrap dealer with the pennies earned going into the mattress kitty.

I suspect the same kind of charitable sweat-equity economics could be applied to a lot of the things being destroyed by Amazon. They could go to community volunteer groups and diverted to local causes where they would do good without affecting the primary market for those goods.