Walmart employee shares heart-wrenching look into backroom operations: 'The customer never sees'

Shoppers are already familiar with cases of excessive plastic packaging that is annoying for buyers and bad for the planet. But as one Walmart employee showed in a recent post, there's even more waste going on behind the scenes that we never see.

What's happening?

The original poster shared a series of photos in the r/Walmart subreddit showing how plastic is collected in their stockroom. "Who's out there that knows the joy of this?" they asked.

"It's such a waste!" — Photo Credit: Reddit

The photos show dozens of plastic bags stuffed full of even more plastic and piled into a baling machine that crushes them into a smaller bundle. Theoretically, this will go for recycling.

However, mixed plastics cannot be recycled like this. They must be carefully separated by type, and even one misplaced piece can destroy a whole batch of recycled material.

Why is this plastic waste important?

Walmart — like many other retailers — produces an incredible amount of plastic waste.

"We do typically one plastic bail a week," said the original poster in a comment. "But during the holiday months we'll do 2 a week."

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"Multiply this by about over a thousand stores," added a commenter. "We waste a lot of plastic. How much of this will genuinely be recycled?"

"The majority of the plastic is just how the product is packaged that the customer never sees," replied the original poster. "Just did a whole break box of fishing lures, must have been over 100 of them. Besides the package they were in each one was in a little plastic bag. A package to protect the package. I see all the time that more effort and resources are put into the packaging then the product itself. It's such a waste!"

All that plastic costs the manufacturer money, an expense that gets passed on to the consumer. The extra labor for employees to package and unwrap items also adds to the costs. Once the plastic is discarded, it sits in landfills, polluting the environment.

Is Walmart doing anything about this?

According to Walmart's sustainability page, the brand had a goal to eliminate unnecessary plastic packaging by this year, including all polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polystyrene packaging. The company's definition of "unnecessary" is unknown. However, there still seems to be plenty of plastic packaging in circulation.