Funko, a company that produces pop culture collectibles, recently announced that it would dispose of USD$30 million worth of Pop! figures due to an excess of stock in its warehouses. Images have now surfaced of unopened boxes of Harry Potter-themed Funkos and other merchandise at landfills and dumps.
Videos and images have appeared on social media showing Funko Pops being dumped at a landfill in Washington state. Most of the merchandise appears to be from the company’s Funkoverse board games, including packages of four figures inspired by a range of popular culture icons, such as Jurassic Park and the Netflix animated series Aggretsuko. Many of the Funkos in the video are from Harry Potter.
The Reddit user who posted the video claimed that they found the boxes of unopened Funkos at the landfill and wanted to highlight the corporate wastefulness and greed of the company. The boxes have to be shredded before being sent to the landfill, and one worker at the site claimed that they had been inundated with old Funko shipments. The pallets of merchandise are shredded and destroyed, with the debris sorted for recycling or landfill.
Funko stated in its recent earnings call that its warehouses were overflowing with excess stock, particularly at its new facility in Arizona, and that it had been paying high rental fees to store additional Funkos in shipping containers until it found space for them. Trashing the excess stock and producing more merchandise later was apparently cheaper than finding additional storage space. The landfill has become one of the places where the excess stock is being dumped.
