Scrapped e-retail orders making plastic curse worse

RETURNS, cancellations and undelivered goods from e-commerce platforms are compounding the plastic packaging waste that the sector is already spewing due to its heavy reliance on the non-biodegradable material as it ships lakhs of items to customers across the country every day.

- Vidya.S

More and more shoppers are buying every conceivable product online. Flipkart’s website says it ships 8 million products every month. But experts estimate that Amazon India and Walmart- owned Flipkart each ship up to 13 million products a month. And as every item bought online requires at least two layers of plastic packaging of some form—bubble wrap, plastic dunnages or polythene bags — e-commerce accounts for a large chunk of plastic packaging that ends up in landfills.

“Returned, cancelled and undelivered goods cause the most environmental impact in terms of plastic waste. Most products are first wrapped in a layer of packing provided by the vendor. Then, they are wrapped with the marketplace’s branded packaging. When a product comes back to us in the form of returns, cancellations or undelivered shipments, we have to scrap all the layers of packaging,” said a representative of sellers’ body All India Online Vendors Association.