A New York Times feature this week painted a fairly grim picture of how e-commerce is affecting the environment. The angle, which feels intuitively right, is that all the packaging, delivery and general frenzy attached to our instant gratification culture is bad for the planet. Amazon predictably carries the lion’s share of our collective guilt.
However, a quick look at the macro data on trash in the United States suggests that things may be a little different from what they seem on the surface. Amazon may in fact be the solution, not the problem.
Less Paper Waste
Data from the Environmental Protection Agency shows municipal solid waste generation per person rising steadily since 1960, when we threw away 2.7 pounds per person per day, to 2000, when daily trash output peaked at 4.74 lbs/day. Since then it has declined slightly to 4.4 lbs/day in 2013. At worst, we’ve been plateauing in our household trash output for fifteen years.
The composition of this waste stream has also changed. In 2001, paper was by far the largest portion of the total at 35.7%. Yard trimmings (12.2%), food waste (11.4%) and plastics (11.1%) were the three biggest contributors after paper. By 2013, things had changed substantially: yard trimmings (13.5%), food (14.6%) and plastics (12.8%) were all up, but paper had fallen to only 27% of the total.
Any way you cut this, we are producing less paper waste per person now than at the turn of the century.
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Amazon to the Rescue
The Times article made a lot of sense, asking rhetorically whether we really need all these boxes within boxes dropped on our doorstep every day. The proliferation of Amazon’s ubiquitous cardboard boxes is of course a reality. Again, macro data shows that e-commerce sales as a percentage of retail sales have indeed grown steadily since the start of the century, comprising 7.4% of the total in the third quarter of 2015.
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It is a paradox: somehow Amazon’s explosive growth, which visibly manifests as millions of boxes in our trash, correlates perfectly with a steady drop in the amount of paper we throw away. Huh?
Lean, Green and Digital
Two things that Amazon does might explain this. One is its relentless pursuit of efficiency. The Times article reports that Amazon has received 33 million comments from customers since 2009 in a “packaging feedback program”. I have also seen and reviewed in detail some of the specifications Amazon created as part of its “Frustration-Free Packaging” initiative driven through its supply base since 2008. The unifying principle is reduction of waste, and while that means eliminating branding manufacturers want consumers to see, it also aims to reduce weight, volume and handling complexity.
Applied to the wider supply chain, Amazon’s massive efficiency quest could certainly be sparking a wave of innovation that is moving packaging engineering away from a relatively wasteful retail presentation mentality and toward a leaner delivery mentality.

At the same time, steady growth in the parcel delivery industry and experimentation by Amazon competitors like Instacart , Postmates, Google GOOGL +2.17% Express EXPR +2.36% and even Uber seem to be fine slicing and optimizing last mile logistics. It is possible that this movement could do for paper packaging what containerization did for efficiencies in ocean freight.
The other and probably more important thing Amazon does is build and deliver content on the digital supply chain. EPA data says that US daily per capita paper waste has dropped from 1.7 lbs/day to 1.2 lbs/day since 2001. I don’t know how much of that is newspapers, magazines and books versus boxes, bags and cartons, but anything you read on your Kindle that doesn’t get dropped in your driveway or mailbox might help explain that missing half pound of trash.
One of the benefits of Amazon Prime , of course, is free content as well as free parcel delivery. Slowly but surely Amazon is steering our consumption habits away from the physical economy and toward the digital economy. Its initiatives in television programming and publishing – plus the huge money machine that is Amazon Web Services – suggest more of the future lies in the cloud than in a box.
Maybe we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.