Amazon is pledging to drastically reduce down on the retailer’s utilization of plastic air pillows in packages and substitute them with paper filler.

Eradicating 95% of the air pillows is a part of Amazon’s broader plan to cut back waste and use recyclable materials at its achievement facilities, the corporate mentioned in an announcement Thursday. Amazon is working to take away all plastic air pillows in North America by the tip of 2024, Pat Lindner, the vice chairman for sustainable packaging mentioned in an announcement. 

The transfer will permit Amazon to cease utilizing some 15 billion plastic air pillows a yr, the corporate mentioned. 

Prospects will discover that the air pillows are lacking from the orders subsequent month beginning throughout Prime Day, the corporate added. Amazon mentioned the paper filler is product of 100% recycled content material and offers equal safety throughout delivery.

Amazon joins firms together with PepsiCo, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Philip Morris Worldwide and Mars in vowing to cut back their plastic utilization, in response to a tally from the League of Ladies Voters. In April, Starbucks unveiled a brand new cup lineup that the espresso vendor mentioned will maintain greater than 13.5 million kilos of plastic out of landfills yearly.

An estimated 33 billion kilos of the world’s plastic trash enters the oceans yearly, in response to the nonprofit conservation group Oceana, ultimately breaking down into tiny fragments. A 2020 examine discovered 1.9 million microplastic items in an space of about 11 sq. toes within the Mediterranean Sea.

Marine life that consumes plastics can get eaten by bigger prey, which in flip can get ingested by people. In the meantime, plastic clean-up prices, together with associated monetary losses to fisheries and different industries, quantities to roughly $13 billion per yr, in response to the United Nations.