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Five years ago, in a splashy speech in Washington, DC, Jeff Bezos rolled out Amazon’s Climate Pledge, a series of commitments to show that the company was serious about addressing climate change.
A core component of that pledge, one that Bezos touted in front of members of Congress during Amazon’s antitrust hearing a year later, was putting 100,000 electric delivery vans on the road by 2030. In a blog post from this July—headlined with a picture of a Prime Rivian van driving through an open field filled with wind turbines—the company proclaims that it has now delivered 800 million packages in the US using EVs, with 15,000 trucks on the road in neighborhoods across the country.
But those EVs might not be doing much to help the climate. The company’s US delivery vehicle emissions have potentially shot up an estimated 194 percent since the Climate Pledge went into place in 2019, according to a new report.
The report, released Thursday from corporate campaigners at Stand.earth, attempts to figure out just how much damage shipping the US’s Amazon orders is doing to the planet. It finds that overall emissions from shipping packages have increased 75 percent since 2019, from 3.3 million tons of CO2 equivalents in 2019 to 5.8 million tons last year. The 2.5-million-ton difference is the equivalent of putting 595,000 additional gas-powered cars on the road for a year.
Those Rivian vans are often just delivering the last leg of a package’s life. Before coming to customers’ doorsteps, packages travel by airplane, cargo ship, and/or long-haul truck—transport methods that are both notoriously dirty and tricky to decarbonize.
Doing the math on Amazon’s delivery emissions entails a lot of guesswork. Unlike some of its competitors, Amazon does not break out details on its emissions associated with shipping and delivery. In fact, the company’s annual sustainability report doesn’t give many hard numbers on its logistics operations, despite Amazon dominating the US ecommerce market and delivering 4 billion packages in the US within two days in 2023.
“Stand.earth’s work is based on inaccurate data, a broad mischaracterization of our operations, and by their own admission, a methodology based on assumptions and unverified information,” Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly said in a statement to WIRED. “The truth is that The Climate Pledge is an ambitious commitment for Amazon and the more than 525 companies that have signed up to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040. It’s only by taking this on that we can work collectively to transform industries such as shipping, transportation, and the built environment, and we need more companies encouraged to take this direction and quick action.” (As well as committing Amazon to addressing climate change, another aim of the Climate Pledge is to get other companies to follow Amazon’s lead.)
Kelly added: “We’ve continued to publish a detailed, transparent reporting of our year-on-year progress. We encourage everyone to track our progress through our annual Sustainability Report, which has correct data, transparent methodologies, and a third-party assurance.”
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The company did not provide WIRED with any additional emissions statistics or other additional data for its shipping and delivery operations.
“We’re doing the best we can with the data available,” says Joshua Archer, a campaigner at Stand.earth and the primary author of the report. “Amazon’s [data] doesn’t even scratch the surface of this massive operations network.”
As a result, the Stand.earth report is based on a mountain of third-party data—all US-based—and math equations to get to some ballpark estimates. UPS and FedEx emissions data disclosed in those companies’ sustainability reports allowed researchers to get an idea of the emissions created by shipping packages by truck in the US. Third-party data from two aviation analytics providers helped to tally up the estimated domestic emissions associated with Amazon Air, a fleet of planes that deliver parcels for the company. Maritime shipping estimates are based on manifest data from US ports where Amazon was a signee. Many of these numbers, the report stresses, are almost certainly an undercount, as authors excluded calculations like emissions associated with package returns and packages shipped or delivered by third-party carriers due to lack of data.
The main culprit for Amazon’s increased shipping emissions, the report finds, is from airplanes: US emissions associated with Amazon Air have skyrocketed 67 percent since 2019. According to Kelly, Amazon’s overall emissions have increased since 2019 due to the company’s expansion during the pandemic.
“When you think of things people order through Amazon, a lot of them are things you don’t need the next day,” Archer says. “Nevertheless, they’re getting shipped on airplanes.”
This trend tracks with the rest of the industry. During the pandemic, port disruptions around the world forced providers to switch over to airplanes to transport cargo; much of this air infrastructure remains in place today. Simultaneously, the US ecommerce market shot up by 43 percent in 2020 as everyone stuck inside ordered more and more stuff. In 2023, the US shipped 21.7 billion parcels—that’s 687 packages every second.
There’s one area where things are improving for Amazon: according to the Stand.earth report, emissions per package have been dropping for Amazon since 2020, which, Archer says, is largely thanks to loading more parcels on bigger planes. (Kelly says that the company’s overall carbon intensity—measuring the efficiency of its operations—has improved by 34 percent since 2019, even as its overall emissions went up.) In comparison, UPS’s package emissions intensity has consistently risen since 2020, thanks in part to its increased reliance on aviation.
But even considering small improvements like these, the aggressive growth Amazon has driven over the past few years is, in many ways, incompatible with sustainability. “Keep an eye on the skies for even more A330s delivering for Amazon customers in the coming months and years,” Amazon concludes in a blog post touting its new, more efficient cargo planes. Unless greener alternatives to jet fuel become available years ahead of schedule, it will be impossible for the company to add more planes to its fleet without also making emissions jump up.
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“Amazon prides itself on being an ambitious and innovative company, but it’s making quite a problem for itself with its air freight cargo growth,” Archer says. “If Amazon is serious about climate progress, that’s a really easy place to start: stop flying so much.”
Amazon is no stranger to climate criticism. Its overall emissions have skyrocketed since it rolled out the Climate Pledge in 2019, despite an incremental drop in 2023. Last year, Amazon lost the support of a key UN-backed global climate organization, the Science Based Targets Initiative, for not meeting certain deadlines to set targets to reduce emissions; it was one of nearly two dozen companies axed by SBTI from its list of climate-conscious companies. In July, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an employee group, released a report criticizing the company’s calculations around its claim that it had met a sustainable energy goal. In 2023, Amazon quietly eliminated a goal to make half its shipments carbon neutral by 2030—a goal which, the company says, was superseded by the larger Climate Pledge.
Part of the issue in calculating emissions for Amazon is just how sprawling the challenges it faces are, thanks to its relentless vertical integration: the Wall Street Journal reported in May that in order to expand its control over its logistics processes, the company had already leased, bought, or announced plans to expand warehouse space in the US by 16 million square feet this year. Kelly said in an email in response to WIRED’s request for comment that the vast network of logistics the company has built allows it to deliver packages closer to their destination and avoid driving long miles.
Reading the company’s sustainability report is an exercise in understanding a variety of different ambitious technical and sociological climate goals across different industries involved in its supply chain. In response to WIRED’s request for comment, Kelly listed out Amazon’s membership in two business organizations advancing sustainable shipping, its membership in a buyers’ alliance encouraging the adoption of sustainable aviation fuel, and its investment in electric trucking: in May, the company put 50 electric trucks on the road in Southern California.
“I think it creates a lot of challenges for the broader transportation industry if every company just does what Amazon does and brings air freight in house,” Archer says. “Then you’ll have a situation where a lot of people are flying a lot of planes.”
There’s a real question of whether or not the company making significant changes would just move emissions from one company’s balance sheet to another’s as the rest of the industry keeps growing. Atlas Air, a subcontractor of Amazon Air, announced in May that it would stop domestic flights carrying Amazon parcels in favor of concentrating on other customers, including Chinese ecommerce titans Shein and Temu.
Still, with Amazon dominating so much of the US market—and with the capacity to kick off trends that other suppliers then follow, like expedited shipping—the company has an opportunity to set an aggressive example, like throwing a substantial effort into decreasing plane use and helping the US build out infrastructure for more sustainable long-haul trucking. (The company didn’t provide figures on how much it has spent on partnerships, research, lobbying, or other activities to decarbonize the trucking sector in the US.)
As for that splashy electric van pledge? The Stand.earth report projects that at Amazon’s current growth rates, if the company puts all the electric vans it promises on the roads by the end of the decade, that would still only account for a third of the company’s deliveries. If Amazon’s sales keep growing on pace, it would need 400,000 EVs to deliver all its packages.
“The 100,000 vans by 2030 is way too little, way too late,” Archer says.
Correction: 9/13/2024 8:00 AM EDT: The figure for Amazon’s improvement in carbon intensity since 2019 was corrected, as the previous figure only accounted for improvements made up to 2021. WIRED also clarified its reporting on Amazon's annual sustainability report.
