Amazon’s carbon emissions declined year-over-year, according to the company’s annual sustainability report released Tuesday.
The ecommerce titan emitted the equivalent 71.27 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022, compared to 71.54 million metric tons in 2021.
This is the first time Amazon has reported a shrinking emissions figure since it began tracking the stat in 2019. Despite the modest progress, 2022 emissions were still 40% higher than 2019.
On a greener note, Amazon’s carbon intensity, a measure of emissions per dollar of sales, decreased 7% from 2021 and is down 24% since 2019.
Scope 2 emissions, or emissions from electricity use, fell 29% between 2021 and 2022, while scope 3 emissions from sources like building construction and third-party transportation dropped 0.7%.
“We achieved this in large part by improving efficiency across our business and continuing our investment in renewable energy,” Amazon said in its report.
Notably, Amazon recently became the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, and the company has pledged that its entire business will be net zero carbon by 2040.
Steps Amazon has taken include spending on wind and solar power for some of its warehouses and the purchase of some 100,000 Rivian electric delivery vans expected to begin service by 2030.
All told, Amazon has more than 9,000 EVs in its global fleet, according to reports.
The company’s climate progress has not been without pushback. Environmental advocacy groups have attacked Amazon’s rapid deployment of new warehouses, arguing that the company’s environmental impact disproportionally hurts the minoirty communities by which its warehouses are often built.
Employees and shareholder groups have also spoken out that Amazon isn’t meeting its current climate commitments.
Meanwhile, Amazon actually walked back a climate goal called Shipment Zero. The company had pledged to make half of all its shipments carbon-neutral by 2030. The company claimed it “no longer made sense” to have a separate goal that applied to one area of its business.
Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com
Follow him on Twitter @andrew_kessel