You may have noticed the new banner on our website: “Not available on Amazon.” We thought we would get on here and explain what helped shape this decision.
Being an environmentally conscious company, we want to make the best decisions we can to help make our world a better place.
The two main concerns we have with selling on Amazon is the affect it has on the environment and the impact on small businesses.
Environmental Impact
Oceana is the largest international ocean conservation and has expressed concern over Amazon’s environmental impact on our oceans.
In 2020, Oceana exposed Amazon for their plastic waste impact on our oceans. After analyzing e-commerce packaging data, they found that Amazon generated 599 million pounds of plastic packaging waste in 2020. (Oceana.org)
Oceana also estimates that 23.5 million pounds were polluted into the ocean waterways.
The type of plastic used in the packaging is considered a film and is very difficult to recycle. It is also often fatal to our sea life, as they mistake the clear film for food.
The same Oceana report found that the air pillows used in Amazon’s packaging would circle the earth over 600 times. Not to mention the space these air pillows take up in shipping crates increasing the box size, amounts of trips needed to deliver the same amount of product and also the fuel that is required to transport these products.
In 2018 amazon emitted 44.4 Million metric tonnes of Carbon Dioxide equivalents into our atmosphere. Though amazon has a net zero carbon plan by 2040, we don’t believe that is addressing the growing concerns of plastic in our ocean ways. It also does not discourage businesses that rely on selling higher volume of lower quality products that are not designed to last.
At Mossify, we use as little plastic as possible and pack our orders with recyclable paper and the smallest boxes we can. This helps protect our ocean ways, sea life and environment.
Small Businesses & Supporting Local
Something else that is important to us is supporting small businesses in the plant community. We focus on delivering the most value and highest quality possible to our distributors and customers.
We do that by supplying garden centres and independent shops where we believe more profit is delivered to the families who run them and in turn, customers receive the best products and services.
During the pandemic, a record number of small businesses were forced to close and large corporations soaked up the gains. To aid the broken supply chain, we prefer to deal directly with local suppliers.
Although there are people who have great success scaling their businesses with Amazon and other large retailers. From our experience, we have found working with garden centres and mom and pop shops to be more aligned with our core values.
We consider ourselves to be a grass roots business, and although Amazon comes with convenient perks, like fast shipping and easy returns, we do our best to deliver with comparable speed and make the experience for our customers the best it can be.
As you can see, our decision to cease sales on Amazon is rooted in our commitment to sustainability and supporting local businesses. Though we do not condemn other companies choices, and are happy to see that Amazon has a Net Zero Carbon plan in place for 2040, we are still quite happy with our decision to make local shipping, shopping and sustainability our main priorities.
Hope this resonates with you and helps clear up any questions you may have about our decision.
Talk soon,
Mossify
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