(Photo: Amazon’s Seattle campus. Credit: Amazon)[/caption]
Amazon sees deep product transparency and traceability as key, the company’s head of worldwide sustainability said in a Q&A for Forbes online published today.
“I think transparency is one of the big opportunities in sustainability,” Amazon’s Kara Hurst told Tom Murray, who heads up the EDF’s corporate partnerships program. Hurst, former CEO of the Sustainability Consortium, shared several examples during the interview.
One is the company’s Sustainability Question Bank, which Hurst says makes Amazon’s environmental information easy to access and search by keyword or phrases. “There’s so much potential to talk directly to customers about the issues that they care about,” she said. “The feedback we get on the Question Bank is also a great way for us to learn what sustainability issues are customers are interested in.”
Another example Hurst cited is Amazon’s private product label for Prime customers called Elements. First introduced in 2014, Elements currently includes baby wipes and multivitamins. Each Amazon Elements product has a unique code on its packaging that provides deeper information about the product, the site says.
Transparency is at the center of the product line, Hurst says. “We provide full ingredient transparency and traceability on those products,” she told Murray. “We want customers to be able to go as deep as they want on transparency.”
The company continues to work on improving sustainability for packaging as well, viewing that through a technology lens. Hurst says Amazon is building software for packaging initiatives that would allow the company to send products without an overbox. They could just ship in one container.
“We don’t need the ‘romance packaging’ to convey information about how the product is used or to promote the product, and we don’t need any of the embedded security devices that you’d have in the store,” she says. “We can get rid of all that excess packaging waste and just ship the product directly in a 100% recyclable cardboard box.”
Recently Amazon joined the Recycling Partnership, an American nonprofit that uses corporate investments to transform recycling nationwide. By the end of this year the organization aims to help companies and cities invest more than $33 million in recycling infrastructure.
New packaging designs are also making a difference for Amazon. The company’s Sustainability Question Bank noted that Amazon collaborated with the largest global manufacturers of pet food in order to convert retail packaging into ready-to-ship e-commerce packaging. Amazon says this reduced the number of packaging components by 50%, lowered packaging volume by 34%, and cut air-shipped by 82%.
In addition, the new packaging reduced damage in the distribution network by 84% and downstream damage for customers by more than 30%. “Migrating retail packaging to e-commerce packaging is a triple win because it reduces packaging material, damage, and cost to the business and customers,” Amazon says.
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