SEATTLE, WA — Amazon confirmed Friday that customer returns from the upcoming holiday rush will be routed directly into a network of company-owned incinerators, the captured heat from which will be used to warm the AWS data halls running the recommendation algorithm that suggested the returned items in the first place.
The initiative, branded Prime Recovery™, closes a loop the company described in its press release as “finally elegant.” A $34 acrylic cardigan purchased on Black Friday, returned December 27, and incinerated December 30 will, according to internal projections, help compute next year’s Black Friday cardigan recommendations by approximately January 4.
“What we’re doing here is taking a previously linear waste stream and turning it into a thermodynamic asset,” said Marin Eklund, head of Sustainable Throughput at Amazon, in a statement that did not mention the word “landfill” but used the word “vector” eleven times. The company estimates Prime Recovery will offset roughly 0.4% of AWS’s holiday-season electricity demand, or about what the recommendation engine itself spends suggesting one additional sweater to each Prime member on December 26.
Devra Holst, a supply-chain analyst at the Atlantic Heartland Project, noted that the math only works if customers continue returning items at current rates. “The model assumes a 38% return rate on apparel,” she said. “If shoppers got better at picking the right size on the first try, the data center would have to go back to burning natural gas, which Amazon has indicated would be, quote, a step backward.”
A leaked engineering memo describes the recommendation system as “net-positive against its own returns” provided the algorithm continues recommending acrylic, polyester, and other high-BTU synthetic fibers, which burn hotter than wool or cotton. Internal slides reportedly suggest deprioritizing organic and natural-fiber listings during peak compute windows.
Asked whether customers would be informed that their returned merchandise was being combusted rather than restocked, an Amazon spokesperson pointed to a sentence added to the returns policy in October that reads, in full, “Items may be processed via thermal recovery.” The sentence appears on page 14, between a clause about gift cards and a clause about Lithuania.
Reaction from shoppers reached on Reddit was muted. “Honestly I figured they were already doing it,” wrote user GwenInPhoenix, who returned a standing desk last March and received a refund accompanied by an email that simply said “thank you.” A separate user noted that the 14-day return window now coincides almost exactly with the burn cycle described in the company’s permitting filings with the Washington Department of Ecology.
Climate researchers were less sanguine. Dr. Henrik Vossberg of the Pacific Coastal Institute called the program “a closed loop in the same sense that a snake eating its own tail is a closed loop,” and pointed out that the carbon released by burning a polyester sweater exceeds, by a factor of roughly nine, the carbon that would have been emitted simply leaving the sweater on the warehouse shelf for someone else to buy.
Amazon countered that leaving the sweater on the shelf would not generate compute, and that compute, ultimately, is what the sweater was for.
The first Prime Recovery facility goes online November 28, which is, the company noted in passing, also Black Friday.