Amazon says carbon emissions elevated 18% in 2021

Amazon’s carbon emissions jumped 18% final 12 months, as the corporate reckoned with a pandemic-driven surge in e-commerce and grew its enterprise to satisfy that demand.

In its annual sustainability report issued Monday, Amazon stated its actions emitted the equal of 71.54 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2021. That is up 18% from 2020, and a rise of practically 40% from 2019, the 12 months Amazon first started disclosing its carbon footprint.

Amazon lowered its carbon depth, which measures emissions per greenback of gross sales, by 1.9% in 2021, in contrast with a 16% decline in 2020.

The Covid-19 pandemic led to an enormous inflow of orders at Amazon and different e-commerce firms. Many shoppers, flush with stimulus checks, opted to do their buying on-line to keep away from risking publicity to the virus.

The wave of demand pushed Amazon to increase its logistics community of supply vans, planes and vans. It quickly launched new warehouses to course of the stream of orders. Between 2020 and the tip of 2021, Amazon doubled the scale of the achievement community it had constructed over the earlier 25 years, the corporate stated.

The corporate additionally added extra knowledge facilities to help Amazon Internet Providers, as Covid-19 sped up firms’ shift to the cloud.

Amazon unveiled its “Local weather Pledge” in 2019. As a part of the plan, Amazon has dedicated to be carbon impartial by 2040, and it bought 100,000 electrical supply vans from Rivian Automotive that it expects to have on the street within the U.S. by 2030. It additionally launched a $2 billion enterprise capital fund to put money into new local weather applied sciences, partly in order that they might be used to additional Amazon’s sustainability targets.

Amazon’s local weather file, and the methods it measures its personal environmental file, have confronted scrutiny. A report earlier this 12 months by Reveal from the Heart for Investigative Reporting discovered the corporate, in distinction to main retailers akin to Goal and Walmart, solely counts product carbon emissions from using Amazon-branded items, and never these it buys from producers and sells on to the shopper.

Representatives from Amazon did not instantly reply to a request for touch upon the reporting discrepancies highlighted in Reveal’s investigation.

WATCH: Watch the primary take a look at Amazon and Rivian’s electrical supply vans