Are we living in the greatest ever era of incineration?
Add your favourite book burning quotes here. Bradbury’s F◦451, Maugham’s Razors Edge, Umberto Eco’s name of the Rose, here and here and here…
But mainly I am keen to find stats on how many books are burnt after non-delivery by providers like amazon etc.
The history of book burning is inflammatory of course. Still surprises me when I ask who has burned a book (and how each page seems to be read as the book is consumed). The controversial historical memory of celebrity book burnings is storied enough – Libraries, Spanish Inquisition, Opernplatz, Bibles, The Koran, Rushdie, etc – But today, seems to me more books than ever are put to the torch. An anecdote from John J about living in the building where Progress Press had its offices back in the winter of 1990: in a fuel shortage, the building heating was stoked by feeding the Collected Works of V.I.Lenin into the furnace (sacrilege). Yet, this is minor compared to what I suspect is going on today with the flame put to the written word by the brutality of delivery services and their doublespeak – “energy recovery” (see article excerpt below).
This from a Katie Tarasov @KATIETARASOV article in January this year from the pretty mainstream source that is CNBC:
“Amazon told CNBC, “No items are sent to landfill. We are working towards a goal of zero product disposal and our priority is to resell, donate to charitable organizations or recycle any unsold products. As a last resort, we will send items to energy recovery, but we’re working hard to drive the number of times this happens down to zero.””
““Energy recovery” often means it’s burned. In the words of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it’s “the conversion of nonrecyclable waste materials into usable heat, electricity, or fuel through a variety of processes, including combustion, gasification, pyrolization, anaerobic digestion and landfill gas recovery.””
““The thing that really shocked me honestly, was the items that the computer system tells you to destroy,” said Shay Machen, a seasonal worker at an Amazon returns center in Mississippi. “I had a book come back, it was a children’s book, and the customer said that it was smashed upon arrival and bent, and it was not. And no matter what I put into the system, it said destroy the item. And that was kind of heart wrenching.””
“Disposal of returns is a widespread practice in e-commerce. Luxury retail brands like Burberry have been criticized in the past for burning millions in unsold merchandise to protect their brands, a practice Burberry told CNBC it stopped in 2018. A Danish TV station reported H&M burned 60 tons of new and unsold clothes since 2013, a claim that H&M told CNBC was a misunderstanding. An H&M spokesperson said, “The products media referred to had been affected by mold or did not comply with our chemical restrictions.” Similar claims have hit Coach, Urban Outfitters, Michael Kors, Victoria’s Secret, and J.C. Penney.”
““It’s the easiest thing to do and sometimes certain brands do it because, you know, they want to protect their brand and they don’t want lesser valued items out there on the market,” Moore said.””
What really happens to Amazon returns
PUBLISHED FRI, JAN 28 20228:00 AM EST
Trinketization 