Amazon promises to become CO2-neutral by 2040 with The Climate Pledge and calls on other companies to follow suit. A sense of duty or marketing?
Amazon has around 44 million regular customers in Germany. That is over half of all Germans. To supply them, nine logistics centers with 11,000 permanent employees are spread across the country. Such a large company has a correspondingly large responsibility: towards its employees, but also towards its customers – and the environment. And Jeff Bezos’ company now wants to take on this responsibility. As a co-founder of The Climate Pledge, an official climate pledge. Find out here what it says, who else is taking part and whether it’s all just marketing.
It usually doesn’t bode well for online retailer Amazon when its name appears in the headlines. This happens, for example, due to Covid-19 outbreaks in Amazon distribution centers or low tax payments. The shipping giant is currently being criticized because an investigative reporter from RTL (Team Wallraff) infiltrated Amazon as a driver. Or at the subcontractor of Amazon’s subcontractor. The working conditions that he uncovered in his report were unpleasant: impossible time pressure, excessive supervision, payment beyond the minimum wage. Amazon responded with a statement and a promise to investigate the allegations.
So it’s no wonder that the company that made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world would like to see its name used more positively. To achieve this, it uses various commercials that do not promote Amazon’s products. Instead, they show what the company does for society. For example, in a commercial stating that around 2,000 Austrian companies sell their products via Amazon, which means that the service provider secures around 10,000 jobs. One of the undertakings that Amazon is currently increasingly using to promote a better image is “The Climate Pledge”. But what is behind the Climate Pledge?
The Climate Pledge is an initiative that Amazon founded together with the Global Optimism organization in 2019. Its aim is to encourage companies around the world to join the initiative and commit to carbon neutrality. By comparison, the countries that have signed the Paris Climate Agreement are pursuing the same goal. However, their deadline is not until 2050, ten years later. The Climate Pledge is therefore an ambitious undertaking. As a founding partner, Amazon is the first company to sign The Climate Pledge and thus commit to implementing its measures.
Three measures of The Climate Pledge:
Companies that commit to The Climate Pledge voluntarily agree to the following three provisions:
But beware: companies will not be sanctioned should they fail to comply with the measures. Unlike the Paris Agreement, The Climate Pledge does not impose penalties if a company fails to meet its targets.
It could be that this fact makes the commitment to the Climate Pledge low-threshold enough. Because at the current time – two years after its launch – a total of 115 companies, including Amazon, have already signed The Climate Pledge and committed themselves to working in a CO2-neutral way by 2040. These include financial companies such as Klarna and Visa, drinks manufacturers Heineken, Pepsico and Coca-Cola Europe as well as technology companies such as Philips, IBM, Microsoft and Siemens. There are also companies that have shaken up the mobility sector in recent years (Lime, Uber), as well as the British television station ITV and the shoe and clothing brands Brooks Running and Vaude. Other big names include the British company Unilever and Mercedes-Benz.
Is The Climate Pledge more than just greenwashing?
All of these companies have responded to Amazon’s call to take action for the climate. On its website, Amazon writes: “Scientists tell us that we have a limited window of opportunity to make unprecedented progress to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050. No company or organization can do this alone and everyone must do their part.”
But when a much-criticized company like Amazon suddenly positions itself as a climate protector, it doesn’t take long for accusations to be made that it’s a PR stunt and greenwashing. Is there any truth in this?
Amazon Sustainability Report 2020
The Amazon Sustainability Report 2020 (only the second of its kind) lists, among other things, the following successes that the company was able to achieve last year:
In addition, there are further ambitious goals. By 2025, Amazon wants to work with 100 percent renewable energy and deliver half of its shipments CO2-neutrally by 2030.
However, the Sustainability Report also serves to measure and report on Amazon’s greenhouse gas emissions. And this picture looks somewhat different from the one painted by Amazon’s successes and goals. The company did not reduce its carbon dioxide emissions in 2020. On the contrary – they increased by 19 percent.
Amazon explains this with increased sales during the pandemic. In the Sustainability Report, the company points out that, as a growing company, it does not focus on absolute emissions, but on carbon intensity. In other words, the amount of carbon emissions per unit of another variable. In the case of Amazon, this variable means: per US dollar of gross merchandise sales. Amazon therefore argues as follows: They have increased their sales so much in the last year that although CO2 emissions have increased, they have actually decreased in relation to sales. Namely by 16 percent.
Greenpeace criticizes Amazon
If you ask Amazon, the company is therefore in the fast lane when it comes to sustainability. However, the environmental organization Greenpeace takes a slightly different view. In 2017, Amazon still failed the Greenpeace Green Electronics Guide (which refers to Amazon’s own electronic devices). Among other things, this was due to a lack of transparency regarding the supply chain and chemicals in the workplace, as well as the use of non-renewable energy.
Greenpeace writes in the report: “Amazon remains one of the least transparent companies in the world in terms of its environmental performance, as it still refuses to publish the greenhouse gas footprint of its own activities.” Today, four years later, Amazon has reversed its transparency strategy and discloses its emissions.
Amazon earns a lot of money with fossil fuels
Nevertheless, Amazon still falls behind other tech giants such as Google and Microsoft when it comes to transparency. Greenpeace criticizes Amazon for not disclosing many things. For example, the way in which the company plans to procure renewable energy or the strategy with which it intends to reduce its carbon footprint from 44.4 million tons of CO2 per year to zero. Furthermore, Amazon does not even provide basic information on its energy requirements, which makes it impossible for Greenpeace to realistically assess the impact of Amazon’s renewable energy projects.
What makes matters worse, according to Greenpeace, is that Amazon’s efforts to use 100 percent renewable energy are limited to its own operations. The supply chain, which accounts for over 75 percent of Amazon’s CO2 footprint, is not included. Amazon is also committed to sustainability while supplying oil companies such as BP and Shell with AI technologies. This enables them to drill for oil more efficiently in order to produce fossil fuels. This is not particularly consistent.
However, criticism is not only coming from Greenpeace. ITV – the British television channel that has also signed The Climate Pledge – also published disturbing images in June this year. An investigation by the news team showed that Amazon destroys millions of items in the UK every year – including electrical goods such as unopened Apple products, books and jewelry. Amazon employees in the UK’s largest warehouse were destroying up to 130,000 items a week, most of them in pristine condition.
The Climate Pledge is a win-win situation for Amazon
All of this makes Amazon’s sustainability pledge much less credible. The suspicion arises that the company has other motives than environmental protection for making such a high-profile commitment to sustainability. In addition to polishing up its own image, there is certainly also an economic interest behind it. Because, as SWR reporter Julian Gräfle put it in the Marktcheck program, measures that make a company more sustainable initially entail high investments. In the long term, however, this can also save a lot of money – and if there’s one thing Amazon can do, it’s save money. If the savings can be combined with climate protection and the company is presented in a more positive light, then it’s a win-win situation.
Should The Climate Pledge be viewed critically? Perhaps. It is certainly a positive development that companies are publicly committing to doing more for the environment and reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. And they are doing so with greater transparency and clearly defined targets. However, it is worth taking a closer look and not taking every success story at face value.
Here’s how you can reduce your own CO2 footprint: Live greener with the climate app.











