Amazon destroys millions of items of unsold stock, many of them unused and new, every year in its warehouses in the United Kingdom, an investigation by British news outlet ITV News shows.
The report included an interview with a former Amazon warehouse worker, who said a fulfillment facility in Scotland destroyed around 130,000 items per week.
ITV took undercover video inside the world's biggest online retailer's warehouse in Dunfermline, Scotland.
The footage showed smart TVs, laptops, drones, computer hard disks, headphones, jewelry, books, and face masks being loaded into crates labelled "destroy."
A further 28,000 items had been marked "donate." The Dunfermline warehouse is one of 24 such fulfillment centers in the UK, from where Amazon also supplies customers in Ireland, the report said.
According to the Amazon employee, workers at the Amazon warehouse were given a weekly target of 130,000 items to destroy.
Around half of the items labelled for destruction were still in bubble wraps, while the other half were returned items in good condition, the employee said.
"From a Friday to a Friday our target was to generally destroy 130,000 items per week. I used to gasp. There's no rhyme or reason to what gets destroyed," ITV quoted a former warehouse manager as saying, according to Business Insider.
In 2019, undercover reporters in France found that Amazon destroyed more than 3 million items in one year, Insider said.
Some of the destroyed items come from third-party sellers who list their products on Amazon's marketplace and pay the e-commerce company for storage.
These sellers may decide to stop paying storage fees if their products go unsold for too long, which can lead Amazon to get rid of the goods.
Some items go to charity, ITV said.
