How Amazon resells, recycles or donates unsold products

Our circular economy programme begins with helping our customers in the UK make informed purchase decisions to get what they want the first-time round, through detailed product information, customer reviews and more.

Knowing this doesn’t always work out, we’ve built robust programmes across our operations for customers and selling partners to return, repair, or resell their products more easily.

In 2020, Amazon launched Climate Pledge Friendly, a programme to help customers discover and shop for more sustainable products on Amazon. We partnered with trusted third-party certifications and created our own certification, Compact by Design, to highlight products that meet sustainability standards and help preserve the natural world. Customers can shop from more than 100,000 Climate Pledge Friendly products in Europe, including Amazon Aware, our line of everyday essentials that are backed by third-party certifications in the Climate Pledge Friendly programme.

Customers can also choose to browse Amazon Warehouse and Amazon Renewed. Amazon Warehouse offers quality, open-box or pre-used products at a discount to customers, giving these returned products a longer lifespan. Similarly, Amazon Renewed allows our third-party sellers to offer like-new refurbished products to customers.

More than half the products in our store are sold by small and medium-sized business. We’ve created a number of programmes that take advantage of Amazon’s logistical network to help sellers incorporate more sustainable practices in their inventory management

• FBA Liquidations allows sellers to re-sell excess or unneeded stock through Amazon’s bulk resale partners.
• FBA Grade and Resell gives sellers the option to sell returned products on Amazon as “used,” instead of having them sent back to them or donated. The products are graded based on condition and sellers can set a new price.
• FBA Donations makes it easier and more streamlined for sellers to donate excess inventory to a wide variety of selected charities, including Age UK, Cancer Research UK and Barnardo’s. Last year, sellers donated more than 11 million products to charities through FBA Donations.

Since 2009, Amazon has partnered with In Kind Direct to donate over £9 million worth of essential products to 2,000 grassroots charities across the UK, who in turn distribute them to those most in need. Organisations that access these donations support a wide range of causes including homelessness and emergency relief, and in 2021 our donations reached over 250,000 people every single week.

Amazon expanded its product donations programme this year by working with The Cottage Family Centre, helping to donate household goods to more than 30,000 families across Fife, Scotland. Additionally, Amazon will provide logistical support to help create a new site for this project in Lochgelly, which will work with a coalition of charity partners to ensure local families get the essential products they need.

With Amazon Trade-In, customers in the UK can trade in used devices such as smartphones and video game consoles and receive an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card in just a few short clicks.

For electronic devices that cannot be repaired or traded in, customers can take advantage of free-of-charge recycling through Recycle with Amazon and Amazon Second Chance. These programmes provide opportunities to send certain electronic devices back to Amazon for recycling, or instructions on how customers can correctly recycle devices themselves.

It’s never too early to develop good values and positive habits – last year saw the launch of several online courses designed to educate children on how they can make a difference through recycling. Anyone can access these free, fun and playful sustainability education materials and help encourage positive recycling behaviour from an early stage.

As part of Amazon’s mission to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, we are committed to building a sustainable business for our employees, customers and communities. We are driving towards a net-zero carbon future and reducing waste is one part of this. Our priority is to resell, donate or recycle unsold products, and we do not send products to landfill in the UK.

We are also on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025. Amazon is the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, and have extended this position each year with new renewable energy projects across the UK and the world. We are also delivering packages with more sustainable modes of transportation, and are committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions across our business by 2040.

Read more about Amazon’s circular economy programme here.