If any company can claim to be a global player, it’s Amazon

The tech giant boasts 310 million active monthly users. That’s about one in every 25 people on the planet. It long ago transcended its humble bookseller origins and now dominates in e-commerce, cloud computing and even digital streaming. As one of the five highest valued companies in the world, Amazon “sets the rules”, said Investing.com. It is “the world’s most influential economic and cultural force”.

On an average day, Amazon customers place nearly 13 million orders, according to recent research by Capital One. But a business that ships between 7 and 9 billion packages per year, to more than 100 countries, has a substantial net climate impact. How can such a colossus hope to be sustainable?

Now, over 50% of Amazon deliveries come with less packaging, or no added packaging at all. Since 2015, Amazon has reduced the weight of its packaging by 43%, equivalent to about 4 million metric tons, according to its most recent Sustainability Report. The company has done away with single-use plastic delivery bags and envelopes in the UK and across Europe. All the packaging used in Europe is 100% recyclable. In 2024, Amazon shipped 12% of its orders worldwide without any additional packaging at all, simply adding a delivery label to the manufacturer’s box. It also diverted up to 85% of its waste from landfill with processes like recycling and composting.

Amazon also managed to protect or restore 49,000 hectares of land between 2019 and 2024 by supporting nature and biodiversity projects: about five times the size of Paris. It has increased the number of electric vehicles used for delivery in Europe to more than 10,000. Globally, it aims to get at least 100,000 on the road by 2030; to support that, it also installed 11,770 EV chargers, bringing its total to 23,000 at 50 delivery stations – the biggest private charging network in the US.

Amazon is a founder of (and one of 550 companies committed to) The Climate Pledge, aiming to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. But its sheer scale makes decarbonisation a challenge. Emissions are also rising, driven by demand for data centre energy. The company is proactively trying to address this via its Amazon Web Services. In Baldy Mesa, a solar farm in the Mojave Desert of Southern California, machine learning models powered by the cloud service are “helping predict when and how the project’s battery unit should charge and discharge energy back to the grid”, said Amazon News. Amazon achieved a 1.15 Global Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) for AWS data centres. The industry average was 1.25.

Amazon also aims to return more water to communities and the environment than its AWS operations use in its data centres by 2030. It’s already more than halfway towards water positivity, at 53%. That means it has returned more than 4 billion litres of water to communities by using more sustainable sources and improving use efficiency. Amazon has an even earlier water positivity target across all its operations in India: 2027.

The company also invests billions in carbon-free, renewable energy and carbon-neutralisation projects. Those projects can generate enough energy to power 8.3 million American homes. It has a brand responsibility score of 6.7 out of 10, according to questionZERO, and ranks 26% above other e-commerce companies for environmental impact.

“We recognise that progress will not always be linear,” said Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, Kara Hurst, “but we remain focused on serving our customers better, faster, and with fewer emissions.”