Sustainability at Amazon

At Amazon, we think long term, take on grand challenges, and invent solutions to complex problems. These are some of the reasons we co-founded and committed to The Climate Pledge in 2019—our goal to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement—and have invited hundreds of companies to join us.

We use broad carbon-free energy options to support our continued growth, enabling us to deploy and grow new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). By scaling carbon-free energy, we aim to make Amazon a more resilient and more sustainable business, drive a global transition to cleaner energy, and achieve our commitment to The Climate Pledge to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

Our waste hierarchy sets out our guiding principles for preventing, managing, and reducing waste. Amazon has programs in place to optimize our inventory, reduce food surplus, and source materials that help us prevent waste in the first place. Where possible, we look for ways to reduce, reuse, recycle, or compost these materials.

To reduce food waste, we are improving our management and distribution channels and buying practices to minimize surplus food inventory. We also work to reduce our surplus by offering discounts on items at risk of becoming waste. Where food waste is not preventable, we are working to keep it out of landfills. We also advocate for policies that would help prevent usable food from being wasted.

We aim to be the safest workplace in the industries in which we operate. To drive continuous improvement, we measure progress against both lagging indicators, such as incident rates, and leading indicators, such as employee sentiment. We have safety audits, inspections, and feedback mechanisms in place at every Amazon facility. Together, these steps provide us with a full picture of our workplace safety.

We take pride in our long-standing dedication and commitment to human rights. While we continue to make progress, we know that this work is ongoing, and there is always more to be done. We are constantly learning and making improvements to our policies, programs, and educational resources to help ensure that our employees and workers everywhere we operate are treated with respect, know their rights, and can safely speak up if they encounter risks at work.

We believe the best way to enable enduring inclusive experiences is through technology. As we deliver on our goals and make progress on our priority commitments, we continue reaching across cultures to connect our diverse world. We use our size, speed, and innovation to unite us in new and exciting ways, incorporating inclusion into everything we do.

Amazon works hard to attract and recruit the best employees and create a valuable experience for them every day. We do this in part by listening to our employees to understand how we can design benefits that work for them and their families and that are optimized for affordability, flexibility, choice, and personalization.

Through Amazon’s global supplier diversity and inclusion (SDI) strategy, we strive to build a more inclusive and equitable supply chain that fully reflects the diversity of our customers and employees. To achieve this, we are prioritizing three actions: driving economic benefits by scaling existing and onboarding new certified diverse suppliers, expanding SDI initiatives across the globe, and partnering with advocacy organizations to further engage with certified Tier 1 diverse suppliers worldwide.

Amazon’s culture is built around finding effective solutions to difficult problems, and we apply this thinking to support the communities where our employees live and work. We leverage our people, technology, and logistics networks to build programs and products that help enable future generations to thrive in our communities. Our work especially emphasizes historically underrepresented communities, because we envision a world that embraces diverse perspectives and where all individuals have equitable opportunities.

Amazon takes a science-based approach to packaging that combines lab testing, machine learning, materials science, and manufacturing partnerships to optimize our packaging. We think locally, taking into consideration factors such as location and geography, average delivery distance to customers, vehicle type, and delivery method. As we regionalize our network, products travel shorter distances to customers and need less protective packaging. We move quickly to invest in responsible shipping and packaging innovations that can scale our program to ship products without additional packaging.

We take a proactive approach to water stewardship, analyzing our footprint, driving operational resilience, and building more efficient systems that reduce our impact on local water sources. Our global water use includes water used in both our direct operations and wider supply chain. We track our progress by measuring and analyzing our direct operational water footprint. This enables us to better forecast future water demand, determine the best ways to conserve water, and create more efficient systems that will benefit local watersheds over time.

We have dedicated teams in key sourcing regions that engage directly with suppliers to communicate our standards, evaluate risks in our supply chain, and help suppliers build their capacities to provide working environments that are safe and respectful of human rights. We assess suppliers of Amazon-branded products globally during onboarding, and periodically thereafter, to evaluate their compliance with our Supply Chain Standards in four categories: Labor Rights, Ethics, Environment, and Health and Safety.

We seek to offer our customers more products that align with their preferences and our sustainability goals. We are improving the materials and sourcing standards for our products, as well as building on our responsible sourcing roadmap developed in 2022 to improve visibility across our supply chains. Our sustainability efforts are not limited to our own operations. We look for ways to encourage our selling partners to develop products with sustainability in mind, such as through our Climate Pledge Friendly program and the Sustainability Solutions Hub.