ACTION ALERT: Tell Amazon to
Reduce Single-use Plastic Packaging
Public Interest Research Group

(May 28, 2025) — Amazon sends out millions of its signature blue and white shipping envelopes every year. Virtually none of them get recycled. That means that they end up in incinerators, landfills or, worse, filling our skies with smoke or our rivers with plastic.

There’s a better way: Tell Amazon to phase out its single-use plastic packaging. 

Amazon has an opportunity to make a big choice about its future and ours. The company could decide to reduce its plastic pollution and help make our world healthier and safer for centuries to come. Wouldn’t that be a great deal for everyone?

We know that it’s possible. Amazon has already phased out single-use plastic packaging in the European Union, which has a population larger than the United States. If Amazon can ditch single-use plastic packaging in Europe, it can act just as responsibly here in the United States as well.

Tell Amazon: Shipping packages shouldn’t create plastic pollution.

Thanks to your advocacy, Amazon has already gone part of the way towards reducing its plastic footprint. When PIRG and our allies called on Amazon to stop its wasteful use of plastic air pillows, Amazon listened.

Now, air pillows are a thing of the past — they were phased out at the end of 2024 — which will prevent billions of pieces of plastic from ending up in our environment and communities every year.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If we want Amazon to take a stand for a clean and healthy future, we need to make our voices heard.

Tell Amazon to reduce single-use plastic packaging.

Thank you for taking action,
U.S. PIRG

THE LETTER
To Amazon CEO Andy Jassy,

I strongly urge you to set a timeline for the elimination of single-use plastic packaging in all Amazon deliveries in the United States. Amazon’s blue and white plastic padded shipping envelopes and white plastic shipping bags are not usually recycled, and contribute to a huge and exceptionally long-lasting plastic waste problem in the United States. Amazon should do what it has already done in the European Union and complete the phase-out of wasteful plastic packaging in the United States.