The Cost of Amazon on the Environment
TED S. WARREN/AP
The e-commerce platform, Amazon, had an explosion in business these past few years, causing tremendous growth, but consequently affecting the environment. Experts say the company’s low prices, fast shipping, and easy purchasing methods encourage consumption. Amazon must actively restock their inventory to keep up with this demand. Making these products takes a large amount of mining and processing, which disturbs ecosystems. To get rid of products once they are eventually thrown out, massive landfills and incinerators are needed.
This cycle of making, consuming and tossing products is called consumer culture. However, companies are not going to simply stop using this business model as it would lower their profits.
Amazon harms the environment substantially when it ships out products. This impact has been amplified by the pandemic, which has caused people to resort to online shopping. Driving, flying and shipping products to various locations uses a lot of gas, and thus pollutes the earth. Transportation of any kind of merchandise relies fundamentally on oil, and Amazon is the monarch of shipping – they will ship anything anywhere fast. Consumers take advantage of this feature, which is why Amazon is so popular, but they may not consider its environmental consequences.
Amazon had emitted 44.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2018, which is more than the entire country of Switzerland did in that same year. In 2019 it increased to 51.17 million metric tons –more than Hungary emitted that year. Finally, in 2020, Amazon emitted 60.64 million metric tons, which is more than Austria.
The company dedicated USD $10 billion in 2020 to fighting climate change. Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, has earned more than this dollar amount in the past two years. His fortune has increased by $75.6 billion.
Amazon is also hurting the planet with their energy sources for their computing and internet business. Amazon Web Services, which include the Amazon website, Prime streaming, and more, brings in half of the company’s income. It is said to be the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully-featured services from data centers globally. It competes with tech giants such as Microsoft and Google for this position, which showcases its true enormity. The more people that use these services, the more equipment Amazon needs to keep them running. The problem is that Amazon doesn’t use clean energy for its operations.
Amazon has said on its website that it is working to lower its effect on the planet through its Climate Pledge. The Amazon Climate Pledge states that it wants to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. Other goals on the pledge include having 100 per cent renewable energy by 2025, 50 per cent of shipping at net-zero carbon by 2030, and 100,000 electric vehicles by 2030. To start this off, Amazon contributed $2 billion to developing decarbonization technology and donated an additional $100 million to assist in reforestation and climate mitigation.
Amazon is trying to be a pioneer in this by spreading the pledge to many countries and companies. So far, they have over 100 signatories, from across 25 industries and 16 from countries.
During COVID, Amazon has worked on this pledge and made significant progress in reducing carbon intensity. So far, they have reached 65 percent renewable energy, which is up 23 percent from 2019. Their absolute carbon emissions increased by 19 percent in 2020 from their boom in popularity, while their overall carbon intensity went down 16 per cent.
Amazon’s sustainability scientists help the company work on its pledges and figure out how to continue reducing its negative environmental impact. They have spent years developing models, metrics and tools to measure the carbon footprint. They have made several discoveries, one of which being that shopping online generates less carbon than driving to a store.
They have five models that work together to view their full carbon footprint: finance, transport, electricity, packaging and devices. Finance prioritizes where to invest, transport measures emissions from shipping, electricity checks the energy used in offices, packaging looks into materials and processes, and devices is viewing device manufacturing.
Amazon is on a good track to improve its carbon footprint, but they have already contributed heavily to our planet’s environmental problems that are far from being fixed.