Some 225,000 metric tons of CO2e. That’s what Amazon says its re:Cycle Reverse Logistics program has prevented since 2020, by keeping retired data center hardware in circulation through reuse and resale instead of prematurely scrapping it. Read closely, though, the report tells two different stories: one about AWS, where the numbers are specific and improving in circularity terms, and one about Amazon’s retail and marketplace operation, where the same rigor mostly disappears.
Start with the data center side. Amazon’s re:Cycle Reverse Logistics program, running since 2020, has prevented 225,000 metric tons of CO2e by keeping retired server components in circulation. Separately, the company avoided buying more than a million new hard drives since 2023 by pulling still-functional drives from aging racks and consolidating them into fewer working units.
Its Ireland reverse logistics facility holds UL Solutions’ Platinum Zero Waste certification, the highest tier available, and in 2025 Amazon added a new layer of automation: AI-powered robots built by robotics startup Molg began disassembling server equipment into components for reuse or recycling, a partnership that started with a Climate Pledge Fund investment back in 2024.
On devices, every final assembly site worldwide for Echo, Kindle, Ring, Fire Tablet, and Fire TV either achieved or renewed Zero Waste to Landfill certification at Silver level or higher in 2025. For the first time, Amazon had UL Solutions verify waste diversion at the system level across 89 supplier sites, confirming a 99% diversion rate. Recycled content in these devices is substantial: components across the device lineup used 57% recycled plastic, 98% recycled aluminum, and 90% recycled magnesium by year’s end, with select Kindle Scribe models running 100% recycled cobalt in their batteries.
Here is where the story gets more interesting for this industry specifically. Amazon sits in the middle of an enormous stream of returned, unsold, and unwanted merchandise from millions of third-party sellers, and electronics move through that stream in volume. Amazon sold 72 million retail sellers’ items through its Outlet program in 2025 rather than pulling them from inventory, and helped independent sellers resell or donate 529 million items through its ReCommerce Services. While those are real numbers, they aren’t broken out by product category, so there’s no way to know how much of that volume was electronics, or what share of the electronics among it were repaired, resold, recycled, or landfilled.
Amazon took a step toward closing that gap in 2025, building an AI system specifically to identify the material composition of unsellable and non-donatable inventory, flagging categories like multilayer plastics and certain electronics for more effective sorting and recycling. The tool’s existence confirms there is an electronics stream in unsellable inventory that doesn’t qualify for resale or donation. No volume figure accompanies it yet.
The consumer trade-in program shows the same pattern at a smaller scale. Amazon traded in 835,000 devices in 2025, describing their fate as either refurbished and resold or “responsibly recycled through certified partners,” without naming those partners or the standard they’re certified to.
The reverse logistics operation on the AWS side is clearly maturing fast and becoming more automated as new AI-driven tools are deployed. The bigger opening for ITAD vendors looking to offer services to Amazon sits on the retail side: a company moving hundreds of millions of returned items a year, with a documented gap in what’s publicly known about the electronics among them, is exactly the kind of counterparty that benefits from a strong partner able to work at marketplace scale.
