Earlier this month, the Pop culture collection company Funko announced plans to throw $30 million worth of Pop! Numbers in the trash because his stock were overflowing with excess inventory. Now images of unopened boxes full of Harry Potter Funkos and more are emerging at landfills and landfills.
“Okay fuck shit I throw things like the trash and they’re all Funko Pops,” said one person in a video that saw it popped up on Reddit a few weeks ago. “Funko pops of all kinds. What the heck?” The person in the video and her friend who shared the short clip declined to give their names, but said the boxes of unopened Funkos ended up in a landfill in the Washington state were found.
Most of them appeared to be from the company’s Funkoverse board games, which include packs of four figures inspired by everything Jurassic Park to the Netflix animated comedy Aggretsuko. Many of the ones in the video are from Harry Potter.
“It was just a situation in the right place at the right time,” said the Reddit user who posted the video my city. “Our main reason for releasing this video is to showcase corporate waste and greed at the expense of consumers.”
What happens to the boxes as soon as they arrive at the dump? Before they actually end up in a landfill, they first have to be crushed. And someone who actually works at one of the sites says they’ve been inundated with old Funko supplies. “Been there for weeks” wrote one of the workers on Reddit above a picture of one of the drop offs. “Funko has Pops crushed and destroyed by the truckload.”
said my city the pallets are approached by truck one by one and then dumped into giant shredders. The leftover trash is then sorted to be either recycled or sent to landfill. The boxes in the one picture they shared are all from Jack Skellington Santas The nightmare before Christmaspossibly leftovers from the holidays.
Disposing of them and making more later is apparently cheaper than finding places to store them for the next eight months. Funko announced this to investors in his last win call that its camps, particularly a new facility in Arizona, were already overcrowded. As a result, it has paid exorbitant rental fees to keep additional Funkos in their shipping containers until it can find space for them. The landfill is now one of those places.
Working at a landfill that shreds collectibles? A longtime Funko collector involved in high-stakes trades? We want to hear from you. Send your tips and stories to [email protected].
