Amazon shoppers should expect less plastic in their packages this year.

The tech and e-commerce giant announced Thursday it was moving away from plastic air pillows — large tubes of inflated plastic tucked inside a cardboard box to keep items secure — and replacing them with recyclable filler paper.

Amazon has already swapped 95% of its plastic air pillows for recyclable paper in North America, the company said Thursday, and expects to fully remove the plastic pillows by the end of the year. It made a similar commitment to remove plastic pillows in Europe in 2022 and to remove single-use plastic packaging in India in 2020.

The change in North America will save nearly 15 billion plastic air pillows annually — marking Amazon’s largest reduction of plastic in North America to date, according to Pat Lindner, vice president of sustainable packaging at Amazon.

The shift comes after years of environmental activist groups and employees asking the company to take more action to mitigate its impact on the environment and commit to reducing its plastic use by at least one-third by 2030.

It also comes shortly after the environmental group Oceana released an April report that found Amazon generated 208 million pounds of plastic packaging waste in the U.S. in 2022, a nearly 10% increase from a year earlier. That quantity — in the form of plastic air pillows — could circle the Earth more than 200 times, Oceana said in its report.

“As one of the biggest retailers on the planet, Amazon is increasingly defining how our goods are packaged,” Matt Littlejohn, Oceana’s senior vice president for strategic initiatives, said in April when the report was released. “The company can solve its plastic problem on a global basis now and into the future if it commits to do so — and follows through.”

Amazon disputed Oceana’s report. It said the total metric tons of single-use plastic used across its global operations decreased 11% from 2021 to 2022.

Oceana says that decrease is largely due to efforts outside the United States and has criticized Amazon for being slow to integrate the same plastic reduction methods it has used in other places in North America.

Littlejohn said Amazon’s reduction of plastic pillows was “welcome news.”

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