Amazon Green provides online shoppers a wide selection sustainable options for items commonly bought online.
In addition to Amazon Green, Amazon has implemented a series of steps in order to improve overall sustainability in its operations. These include frustration-free packaging, reduced packaging waste, environmentally friendly packaging, and their Earth Kaizens program.
Frustration-Free Packaging
Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging is a multi-year initiative designed to make it easier for customers to liberate products from their packages. Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging eliminates hard plastic “clamshell” cases and those annoying plastic-coated wire ties, commonly used in toy packaging.
Through the Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging Certification initiative, manufacturers can send their packaged products
to our labs for free analysis and feedback on how their packaging can become Certified Frustration-Free. The program today offers over 350 best-selling items from leading brands including Mattel, Logitech, Fisher-Price, Garmin and Seventh Generation, as well as Amazon brands like Kindle and AmazonBasics.
In addition to making products easier to open, Frustration-Free Packaging uses 100% recyclable cardboard. The product itself is exactly the same-Amazon has just streamlined the packaging.
To learn more, visit www.amazon.com/frustration-free.
Reducing Packaging Waste
Since 2007, Amazon has made significant progress to reduce excess packaging in its shipments to customers and has introduced additional types of recyclable packing materials to protect items while in transit.
Amazon has developed a software program that determines the “right-sized” box for any given item to be shipped to a customer, based on that item’s dimensions and weight. As a result, the number of packages shipped in a wrong-sized box has decreased dramatically, significantly reducing packaging waste and transportation costs. In 2008, Amazon also sent 35% of its larger-sized packages to customers without any additional packaging, further reducing packaging waste and transportation costs.
In 2009, Amazon launched its Packaging Feedback program, which allows customers to provide direct feedback on the packaging of their Amazon.com order and to upload images of their Amazon.com packages. Their feedback will be used to improve product and Amazon packaging. This new feature is available at www.amazon.com/packaging.
Environmentally Friendly Packaging
Most Amazon.com orders are shipped in corrugated containers which on average contain 43% recovered fiber content. Once used, these containers are 100% recyclable for use in the manufacture of other paper products.
In Amazon’s U.S. fulfillment centers that primarily ship larger products such as televisions, kitchen appliances, and other household items, we’ve introduced paper packing materials that are 100% recyclable and are made from 50% recycled content.
The air-filled pillows that are sometimes used to protect items in Amazon shipments are 100% recyclable and non-toxic. If a customer cannot reuse or recycle these cushions, they can be deflated and disposed of. Deflated air cushions take up less than 1% of their inflated volume.
Earth Kaizens
Environmentally conscious Amazonians work together to implement environmental and energy initiatives across all parts of the company. Composed of hundreds of Amazonians, this group is known as “Earth Kaizens,” from the Japanese term meaning “change for the better.” Amazon employees at all levels dive deep into every nook and cranny of a process to identify waste and design alternative solutions that are more energy efficient.
The power of the Earth Kaizens comes from the cumulative impact of many people participating in a large number of focused projects, each delivering reductions in energy consumption and waste. The energy savings from a single Kaizen project may not seem significant, but shared across our global network, they can produce meaningful results.
