Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Meeting Net-Zero Ambitions

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently sat down with his chief sustainability officer Kara Hurst during Climate Week NYC to discuss Amazon’s sustainability strategies. 

Jassy shared insights on the company’s actions and goals for reducing its environmental impact, offering a transparent look at Amazon’s progress and the challenges which remain.

From optimising logistics to pioneering green tech, we look at Amazon’s key approaches.

#1 - Move products close to customers

Facing mounting logistical demands from rapid growth since he became CEO in 2021, Andy acknowledged Amazon’s need to balance expansion with sustainability.

The company recently regionalised its fulfilment network in the US, creating eight distribution hubs designed to keep products closer to customers.

By shortening the distance that its packages travel, Amazon has cut back on air transport and reduced the miles covered by its delivery vans, many of which now operate as electric vehicles with zero tailpipe emissions.

The company estimates that this operational shift helped avoid around 16 million miles of travel last year, leading to a significant reduction in delivery-related carbon emissions.

#2 - Making a net-zero pledge

At the heart of Amazon’s sustainability drive is The Climate Pledge, a commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 — a full decade ahead of the Paris Agreement’s target.

For Jassy, sustainability isn’t a side project but a principle embedded within Amazon’s core business strategies.

“When we announced the Climate Pledge in 2019, we didn’t really have a plan on how we’d get there," he said. "We knew how to get a good chunk of the way there, but there’s still a lot of innovation left to happen.”

In the four years since that pledge, Amazon has become the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, with a global portfolio of more than 500 wind and solar projects.

Every senior leader at Amazon has sustainability targets and must account for their progress regularly.

Jassy said: “You can’t wake up in the year 2038 and decide that you’re going to make this happen.”

#3 - Meeting customer expectations

For more than 25 years, Amazon has built a culture around “customer obsession” and Jassy noted that today’s customers increasingly expect companies to demonstrate environmental responsibility.

“It turns out, of course, most people care about this,” he said. “Our customers care about this, our partners care about this, our employees care about this.”

Jassy emphasised that, for Amazon, balancing customer needs with sustainability is both a responsibility and a long-term business strategy, requiring continual adaptations to products and services to meet rising environmental standards.

He added: “If you want the planet to be inhabitable for our kids and our kids’ kids, we have to make changes.”

#4 - Developing energy-efficient AI chips

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has invested heavily in efficient AI solutions to meet sustainability demands. With the rising use of generative AI — which requires immense computing power — AWS has developed energy-efficient chips such as Trainium and Inferentia.

These purpose-built chips, designed for AWS’s AI clients, help make cloud-based AI more sustainable.

“The reality is that moving to the cloud is four times more energy efficient than running on-premise,” Jassy pointed out, suggesting that cloud migration could help other companies lower their carbon footprints by avoiding the need for less efficient, on-premise servers.

#5 - Encouraging wider change

Amazon’s sustainability ambitions goes beyond making internal improvements to fostering change across industries.

The Climate Pledge Fund, created to accelerate sustainable technology, has invested in more than 25 companies focused on solutions in green hydrogen, energy storage, low-emission freight and sustainable construction.

These investments, Jassy maintained, are key to decarbonising high-emission sectors.

He said: "Most of the technology companies have been working hard at renewable energy, and we got there in 2023, but if we want to get to our collective goal, it doesn’t work if just one company gets there. We all have to do it together.”

Scale of the challenge

Jassy concluded by acknowledging the scale of the challenge for Amazon, a company with one of the world's largest supply chains, whose annual operational emissions roughly equivalent to those produced by the entire country of Morocco.

“If you think about what Amazon does as a more industrialised company — the packaging we have, the last-mile transportation, the middle-mile trucking, the ocean freight and the air travel that we do — that is a very different equation and much harder to do.”

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