Amazon continues to pursue multi-year waste reduction initiatives such as e-commerce ready packaging and Amazon Frustration. free packaging that is promoted as easy to open, 100% recyclable packaging and to ship products in their own packages without additional shipping boxes. Such efforts also seek to eliminate hard plastic cases and the plastic-coated wire ties commonly used in toy packaging. Amazon quotes ‘these initiatives have grown to include more than 1.2 million products over time and have eliminated more than 36,000 tons of excess packaging just in 2015’. They also go on to say that If executed well, their innovations will also help them to; reduce prep, packing material and shipping supplies; reduce our operational costs by increasing the use of recycled materials; increase the overall density of the packages we ship – good for transportation savings and less waste for our customers; and reduce the things that get damaged in transit and eliminate wasted packaging.
Amazon is part of Amazon Web Services' long-term commitment to achieve 100% renewable energy usage for the AWS global infrastructure footprint and they are planning to build several solar farms in the U.S. Located in Virginia, Indiana, Ohio and North Carolina respectively, these new solar and wind farms are expected to generate more than 1.6 million MWh of additional renewable energy into the electric grids that supply current and future AWS Cloud data centers. The energy produced from these projects is enough to power roughly the equivalent of 150,000 U.S. homes, which is slightly larger than the city of Cleveland, Ohio. The new developments and technologies are helping countries and their people power their homes with thanks to Amazon and their plan to make the world a more sustainable place.
Amazon’s mission is to ‘continually raise the bar of the customer experience by using the internet and technology to help customers find, discover and buy anything, and empower businesses and content creators to maximise their success’. Their mission is good for their customers because they benefit from continually improving selection, value and convenience in getting goods, services and entertainment, while businesses benefit from digital services to serve customers at scale and increase their productivity. Another way Amazon uses technology retailers to promote sustainable fashion.