'Our goal hasn't changed': Amazon's 2040 net zero ambition unaltered by Donald Trump effect as UK electric lorry rollout revealed
Amazon says it is sticking by its target of making its global operations carbon neutral by 2040 despite the Donald Trump administration opposing net zero policies.
In 2019, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos announced the launch of The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reaching net-zero carbon by 2040; a decade ahead of the Paris Climate Agreement target of 2050. Since then, more than 400 companies have also signed The Climate Pledge.
But the global political approach to net zero has been affected by the re-election of Donald Trump whose administration is prioritising expanding energy production over cutting carbon emissions. In February, an order issued by US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said: “Net-zero policies raise energy costs for American families and businesses, threaten the reliability of our energy system, and undermine our energy and national security.”
At Amazon’s Delivering the Future event in Dortmund last week, a senior company executive said the company’s long-standing strategy on net zero was not changing.
When asked by reporters whether the 2040 target is being affected by changes to America’s political environment, Andreas Marschner, Amazon Vice President for Global Engineering Services and Worldwide Operations Sustainability, said: “We have publicly made a commitment back in 2019 with a goal that we will be carbon neutral by 2040 and that goal hasn’t changed. By the way, our customers care that we are living up to our [commitment].”
When asked by The Yorkshire Post if the company is on track to meet its 2040 target, Mr Marschner said Amazon is “making progress” but not every issue has been solved and there are remaining challenges around long-distance transportation of goods through channels such as maritime shipping.
Amazon’s most recently published annual sustainability report said that in 2023, its operations produced a carbon dioxide equivalent of 68.82m metric tons – around three per cent down on the 2022 figure of 70.74m metric tons. The company has co-founded the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance (ZEMBA) in an attempt to accelerate commercial deployment of zero-emission shipping.
Mr Marschner said: "The challenge of climate change and getting to a net zero carbon situation is nothing that can be achieved alone. It requires joint efforts and partnerships, that is what we are heavily engaged in to help us advance.
"Distances in the US are longer than on the European side. A big driver to decarbonise our operations is to make sure you are having a product which is in demand placed as close to the customer demand as possible. That is universally applicable, it doesn’t matter if we are talking about Japan or we are talking about the US, Australia, India, the UK, Italy or Spain.
"We are a global company and we want to make all of our operations carbon neutral.”
A recent report by campaign group Stand.earth analysing the company’s US shipping and deliveries said that in multiple areas Amazon’s carbon emissions are increasing and that the company “has failed to offer a viable pathway toward meaningful reduction in its transportation emissions”. Amazon described those findings as inaccurate and “based on assumptions and unverified information”.
Amazon has committed more than €1 billion to decarbonise and electrify its transportation network in Europe and used the Dortmund event to showcase a new range of vehicles it will be using as part of those efforts.
Amazon recently placed it largest-ever single order of electric heavy trucks, with more than 200 new eActros600 vehicles from Mercedes-Benz Trucks due to be rolled out in the UK and Germany later this year. Mr Marschner told The Yorkshire Post that around 150 of the lorries will be used in the UK.
Amazon has said it will install 360kW electric charging points at key sites, capable of charging the batteries of the 40-tonne trucks from 20 to 80 per cent in just over an hour, with journeys being timed so that the charging process takes place while drivers are on their breaks. The zero-exhaust-emission vehicles are expected to transport more than 350 million packages each year once fully operational.
The company also plans to “significantly increase” the number of electric delivery vans it uses in Europe, while it has also set up dozens of sites in big European cities from which its teams can make deliveries either on foot or by electric cargo bike.
The company is also deploying new automated packing technology in sites across the UK and Europe in which boxes are instantly custom-made to the size of a product in a bid to reduce packaging waste and also enable more deliveries to be made with fewer vehicles.