Amazon still see sustainability as one of their top priorities despite COVID-19 and have made significant progress with The Climate Pledge thanks to key initiatives and the dedication of thousands of employees in various teams across Amazon. The effects of COVID-19 on society have already caused air pollution levels to drop and companies like Amazon can learn from these uncertain times and take action in the climate fight.
Amazon’s steps towards The Climate Pledge
Amazon announced this week a $10 million commitment – This commitment is part of their $100 million Right Now Climate Fund—to conserve, restore, and support sustainable forestry, wildlife, and nature-based solutions around the world. This first commitment, in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy, will support family forest owners in the Appalachian Mountains by creating a new income source to restore and conserve forest lands, protect wildlife, and help remove millions of metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere. This is the first of more projects to come in this area.
Continued efforts in reducing their packaging waste – Their Frustration-Free Packaging program encourages manufacturers to package their products in easy-to-open packaging that is 100% recyclable and ready to ship to customers without additional Amazon boxes. Since 2015, Amazon have reduced the weight of outbound packaging by 33% and eliminated over 800,000 tons of packaging material, the equivalent to about 1.5 billion shipping boxes.
Amazon has invented machine learning algorithms These help Amazon make the smartest packaging choice for customer orders. Their Packaging Lab also developed a new, fully recyclable paper padded mailer for customer orders. Meanwhile, services like Amazon Second Chance, make it easier for customers to find out how and where to recycle various types of packaging and old electronic devices in their community.
In the midst of all the drama from the current pandemic, it’s important that companies remain focused on sustainability campaigns, in many ways, the current events have provided a push in the right direction and will continue to promote the rapid advance in technology that will assist it.
One Response
It is interesting that last year Amazon cut the cost of removal orders to match the cost of disposals due to environmental pressure. However this year they have not only reversed the change but increased the cost of removal orders to be weight-based, even if multiple items are being sent together.
I am finding that some items are costing more to be returned than to purchase new. So any customer returns that may be salvageable now make financial sense to be disposed of now. Definitely not an ideal environmental outcome.
They grabbed the headlines when they reduced the cost of removal orders because disposal was in the headlines, but quietly changed it to worse than before, and this has not been reported on. Surely worthy of a headline grabber that could encourage some action by amazon to reduce the removal order fees again?