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Amazon Sustainability Goals — Definitely The Key to Its Future Growth

An Amazon fulfillment center - Amazon Private Label Brands

Sustainability is a mindset. A company has to commit to sustainability—until it becomes a habit and a guiding principle. In recent years, Amazon has taken this bold idea to heart and have made great strides in pushing for sustainability. It achieved this move with a top-down approach emphasizing that the Amazon sustainability goals are the key to their future growth.

Amazon Sustainability Goals Launch Question Bank

In 2014, Amazon hired Kara Hurst, former CEO of the Sustainability Consortium. She is now Amazon’s director of worldwide sustainability and social responsibility. Under her leadership, the company launched the Amazon Sustainability Question Bank, which provides in-depth answers to questions about Amazon’s status and directions regarding the Amazon sustainability goals. This case is a step forward in creating transparency and responsibility for the company. The question bank also serves as a feedback mechanism on how it can improve on its efforts.

In August 2015, Christine Bader came onboard as the director of social responsibility. She had previously worked with BP and is the author of “A Manifesto for the Corporate Idealist” (PDF). She is also a Lecturer at Columbia University and co-teaches a course on Human Rights and Business.

More Sustainability Experts for Amazon

In December 2015, Amazon hired Christina Page. She had previously led the energy and sustainability strategy at Yahoo, where her work put emphasis on data centers, acknowledging that this one was a big opportunity for sustainable energy. Yahoo then implemented a different cooling center architecture called the Yahoo Computer Coop which used ambient air and had a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.08.

Amazon also hired Dara O’Rourke as the principal scientist on the Sustainable Science Team. He was a former professor of environmental and labor policy at the UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Good Guide.

Amazon hired more than 50 people for its Sustainability Science group which also include: social responsibility; energy and environment; customer packaging experience; sustainability services; and sustainability technology.

Understanding the Challenge of the Amazon Sustainability Goals

The task has been huge. To understand the problems of sustainability for customer packaging, one has to note that the bulk of Amazon’s business is in e-commerce retail. In 2017, Amazon was the number one e-commerce retailer, with more than $94.665 billion in sales. This figure accounted for 70 percent of the company’s revenue. On the ranking, Apple was a distant second with $16.8 billion in e-commerce sales. To put Amazon’s sales into perspective, the company outsold all the rest of the top 50 online retailers combined.

To achieve that volume of sales, Amazon ships 3.3 million boxes of various sizes every day. The company makes an effort to ship the boxes sustainably—and have taken big steps in going further. Like most large retailers, it uses recycled cardboard for its boxes. In a recent interview, Kara Hurst mentions that the products can be placed directly in a 100 percent recyclable cardboard box without any excess packaging waste.

Other Sustainable Projects by Amazon

The company is also working on initiatives where the products would be sent without an overbox. Sending 3.3 million packages daily without an overbox could be an initiative for their sustainability goals.

Developments with the Amazon Sustainability Goals

In other developments, the Amazon sustainability goals also made big steps in the quest for 100 percent renewable energy infrastructure. The company has recently launched its largest wind farm. Located in Texas, it contributes 1 million megawatts per hour. The company also plans to install 50 solar rooftops on their fulfillment centers by 2020.

With all these initiatives and the internal infrastructure in place, Amazon is set to make great strides in sustainability and renewable energy self-sufficiency. Certainly, this fact is no less than a bold move that could set a trend for other global organizations.

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