An investigation led by Greenpeace has shown that Amazon is instructing third party sellers to throw away and destroy returns and new goods.

The investigation by Greenpeace, Business Insider and ZDF frontal has shown that the online giant is pushing its third party sellers to throw away and destroy goods. As such Amazon itself denies responsibility for the destruction of the goods.

In the report by the group, they showed that Amazon charges third party sellers for the destruction operations, that is sometimes conducted after exporting those goods to different countries.

It is alleged that sellers are forced to have a high throughput of their goods in Amazon warehouses where they pay to use Fulfilled by Amazon. “Amazon is relying solely on fast sales and therefore considers the space on the shelf more valuable than the product inside,” said Vila Wohlgemuth, resource conservation expert at Greenpeace.

This is not new, with reports showing this behaviour by Amazon over the years. However, the investigation shows up the online giant’s continued high profile claims to being on a sustainability drive as being less than genuine.

In response to the investigation, Amazon said that less than 1% of new goods are destroyed. The investigation alleges however, that this only applies to goods sold directly by Amazon itself and not third party sellers.