Amazon's UK warehouses are destroying millions of unsold products every year, investigation reveals

Amazon is also under fire for apparently using algorithmic-enforced staff turnover targets

Ecommerce giant Amazon has been accused of destroying millions of unsold items every year in its UK warehouses.

ITV News secretly filmed inside the retailer's Dunfermline warehouse in Scotland, and found stacks of boxes marked "destroy" that were filled with smart TVs, laptops, computer drives, drones, jewellery, hairdryers, books, and various other items in the 'destruction zone' of the warehouse.

The news outlet claimed it tracked some of the items being carried away by lorries to recycling centres and a landfill.

The goods were either new or returned by a customer, and almost all of them could have been redistributed to charities or those in need, the report said.

An ex-employee of the company told ITV News: "From a Friday to a Friday our target was to generally destroy 130,000 items a week.

"I used to gasp. There's no rhyme or reason to what gets destroyed: Dyson fans, Hoovers, the occasional MacBook and iPad; the other day, 20,000 Covid (face) masks still in their wrappers."

According to a leaked internal document that ITV quotes, more than 124,000 items at the Dunfermline warehouse were marked Destroy in one week in April. In contrast, just 28,000 items were labelled 'Donate' for the same period.

The report claims that Amazon's hugely profitable business model is behind its practice of disposing off hundreds of thousands of products in that way.

Many vendors prefer to store their products in Amazon's warehouses. The longer a product remains unsold, the more fees the vendor has to pay to Amazon for housing the item. Therefore, it becomes cheaper to destroy the items than to continue housing them in the warehouse.

In an interview with ITV News just six weeks ago, Amazon's UK chief, John Boumphrey, said the amount of goods that Amazon destroys is "extremely small".

In response to the ITV News investigation the company said: "We are working towards a goal of zero product disposal, and our priority is to resell, donate to charitable organisations or recycle any unsold products.

"No items are sent to landfill in the UK. As a last resort, we will send items to energy recovery, but we're working hard to drive the number of times this happens down to zero."

Other aspects of Amazon's business products have also come under the spotlight. On Monday, the The Seattle Times reported that Amazon has a target to lay off 6 per cent of its office employees every year, with the unfortunate staff selected by algorithm.

The report cites internal company documents which revealed that Amazon's proprietary software uses processes that help meet a target for turnover among low-ranked office employees, a metric Amazon calls "unregretted attrition". The process resembles the controversial stack ranking practice, in which workers are graded by comparison with each other rather than against performance goals, the paper said.

Responding to the report, an Amazon spokesperson insisted that the company does not engage in stack ranking.

"We do not, nor have we ever, stack ranked our employees," spokesperson Jaci Anderson told The Seattle Times.

She added that the goal of the Amazon's performance review process is to provide workers "more information and insights to continue to grow in their careers at Amazon."

In related news, a survey by the UK trade union Unite has revealed that the British public is largely supportive of trade union recognition for Amazon employees.

Nearly three quarters of the 2,000 UK residents surveyed for the poll said that Amazon employees should be able to join a trade union without interference from the company, while 68 per cent said they support effective trade union recognition as a prerequisite for firms securing public sector contracts.