Amazon.com Inc announced that it would disclose its carbon footprint later this year, giving consumers and investors new insight into the environmental cost of its popular two-day shipping.
The company also pledged in a blogpost on Monday that half of its shipments would be “net zero” carbon — also known as carbon-neutral — by 2030.
The world’s biggest e-commerce company has for years resisted pressure from investors and other stakeholders to disclose more information about its environmental impact.
Late last year, several Amazon employees used their stock grants to submit shareholder proposals asking the company to devise and disclose its plans for climate change.
Estimating the emissions from e-commerce is complicated. Ordering something online is often less energy intensive than driving to and from a physical store to pick up an item, because shipping can take advantage of economies of scale.
However, the benefit declines rapidly as delivery times get shorter and when customers do not group items together, Massachusetts Institute of Technology sustainable logistics professor Josue Velazquez-Martinez said.
That is a challenge for Amazon, which now counts more than 100 million Prime members, all of whom are eligible for two-day shipping.
“When customers want to receive a product in one or two days, the carbon emissions increase substantially,” Velazquez-Martinez said. “If you are willing to wait a week, it’s like killing just 20 trees instead of 100 trees.”
Amazon did not say whether it would be buying carbon offsets outright, and absent that, the most likely way for it to reach its emissions goals would be to fine-tune its delivery process.
The “last mile” of delivery — from a warehouse to a customer’s home, for example — is often one of the largest costs for e-retailers, Velazquez-Martinez said.
“They’ve definitely been a leader in terms of reducing packaging waste and purchasing renewable energy, but they still have a lot of improvements they can make,” Nuveen head of exchange-traded funds Martin Kremenstein said.
Social issues are becoming a bigger concern for Amazon, highlighted by concerns about labor, wages and its local impact after it withdrew a plan for a second headquarters in New York City, he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained