Amazon Withdraws From Zero-Emission Promise

The shipping giant Amazon has withdrawn part of its “climate promise”. The part of the “Shipment Zero” project that refers to targets up to the year 2030 has been removed from the program. But that does not mean that Amazon is now giving up all climate targets.

This is reported by the online magazine Business Insider. The changes came after Amazon removed a key step in its climate targets for the company’s carbon footprint.

In an announcement published in 2019, Amazon said it had set a goal of shipping 50 percent of its shipments carbon-free by 2030. The original statement on the climate targets has been deleted.

Carbon footprint underestimated

The journalist Will Evans has dealt with the change and analyzed what exactly Amazon has now changed. Evans had checked with Amazon accordingly and said whether the group had canceled the target because it would be missed. Amazon denies that. However, Evans also showed last year that Amazon has greatly underestimated its own “carbon footprint”. Of course, this also makes it more difficult to achieve the initially set goals.

Amazon then published a brief update on its climate pledge. It says now:

Update “Shipment Zero”

As we reviewed our work on The Climate Pledge, we realized that a separate and narrower “Shipment Zero” target covering just part of our business no longer made sense, so we decided to abolish it. We set Shipment Zero as our goal before announcing our commitment to The Climate Pledge, which is a broader effort to drive innovation and decarbonization across our business. 

We remain focused on The Climate Pledge and our goal to become zero carbon across our entire business by 2040. This includes powering our business with 100 percent renewable energy, transitioning and decarbonizing our transportation network with electric vehicles and alternative fuels, using more sustainable building materials, and reducing packaging waste.