Do we need a record-setting Amazon Prime Days every year?

In 2022, Amazon announced that it had just achieved the biggest Prime Day sales event ever with more than 300 million items sold.

The next year, Amazon announced that 2023 was now the biggest-ever Prime Day. Customers bought more than 375 million items.

This year brought another Prime Day promotion – and you guessed it! The 2024 promotion was even bigger still than all the rest. During the two-day sale in July, customers purchased more items from Amazon than during any other Prime Day in history.

Now, yet another sale is on the way, with Prime Big Deal Days planned for October 8 and 9. The sale means millions more Amazon transactions – resulting in millions of items packaged in disposable packaging, ferried around by thousands of trucks – are soon to come. 

Shopping online is a modern convenience many of us depend on. But these big sale events often promote wasteful items and encourage us to buy things we don’t need.

If Amazon Prime Days are just getting bigger and bigger, how does that add up in terms of waste and pollution?

Amazon’s deliveries produce plastic waste

When you multiply every piece of packaging on an Amazon purchase by the hundreds of millions of items bought on each Prime Day, it adds up to an enormous plastic problem. And that doesn’t even account for all the Amazon purchases made every other day of the year. 

One report estimated that the plastic waste generated by Amazon in just a single year would be enough to encircle the Earth 800 times in the form of plastic air pillows. 

Amazon claims that much of the packaging the company uses to deliver goods is recyclable, either through curbside recycling programs for their cardboard packaging or store drop-off for its plastic packaging, but the truth is more complicated. Trackers placed in Amazon plastic packaging and delivered to Amazon recycling drop bins across the country revealed that almost none of the tracked pieces of plastic were actually recycled.

Amazon has begun to make some progress on reducing plastic in its shipments. In June, the company announced that it was most of the way toward achieving its goal of phasing out plastic pillows from its North American deliveries. 

As the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon has both the resources and the opportunity to do better. Together, we’re urging the company to continue to cut plastic waste so future Prime Days can be more sustainable.

Prime Day sales promote wasteful tech

But no matter how sustainably Amazon’s items are packaged, there’s still the fact that many of the deals on offer are for items we either don’t need in the first place, or that aren’t built to last. No matter how low prices drop during Amazon Prime Days disposable, unrepairable tech is never a good deal.

You’ve probably bought a gadget like this before: It seems convenient or cool, but it breaks or dies fast. And then you discover that it can’t be repaired or reused, so you have to buy a new one. 

That’s fast tech – and fast tech items crowd Amazon’s digital shelves during Prime Day promotions. Consider one of Amazon’s best-selling Prime Day items, Apple AirPods. Sometimes AirPods stop working in as little as 18 months because the battery inside degrades. Once the battery has completely died, it can’t be replaced because the AirPods are glued shut.

Regular Prime Day deals encourage you to always buy the next new thing, even if you don’t need it.

Online shopping burns energy and produces climate pollution

Some of the most convenient things about shopping with Amazon are also things that produce a lot of pollution. The digital infrastructure required to curate a digital storefront like Amazon’s and process all of our transactions consumes a staggering amount of energy. And then, of course, items you buy online need to be shipped from the warehouse to your house – often in fossil-fueled vehicles. 

Data centers, like the ones needed to fuel Amazon’s website, consume ten times the power of the average American home per square meter. Keeping the enormous racks of servers cool is a big part of what makes data storage so energetically expensive – and cooling systems are also huge consumers of water.

Meanwhile, the shipping industry alone accounts for 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hauling online shoppers’ items from place to place puts a lot of trucks on the road. 

Amazon does offer customers the choice to consolidate their deliveries, letting the company plan trips efficiently. This past Prime Day, Amazon estimates that its Prime shoppers averted 10 million truck trips. But the most efficient trip is the one that never needs to be taken in the first place.

How to help cut all this pollution? Don’t buy into the Prime Days hype.

The best way to solve all these problems and help build a more sustainable future is to use what we have, repair it when it breaks, and invest in new stuff that’s built to last only when we really need it.

Recycling plastic and shipping products in more energy efficient ways are great ways to start making businesses like Amazon’s more sustainable. But the overabundance of “stuff” in our lives is fueling the climate crisis, causing piles of plastic pollution to pile up, and costing us a lot of money, too. Promotions like Prime Days, disposable tech, and overproduction fuel faster and faster cycles of consumption. The true heart of the solution is to consume less, and ultimately get the best deal – a healthy environment and a more sustainable future.