Amazon is going green.
In a blog on Monday, Amazon announced its new “Shipment Zero” initiative on the company’s blog. It asserts a long-term goal of using 100% renewable energy for all Amazon infrastructure globally, with a medium-term goal of making 50% of its shipments carbon neutral. The company will also release Amazon’s company-wide carbon footprint later this year.
Why now? The company said improvements to renewable technologies such as electric vehicles, aviation bio fuels, packaging, and energy had made the path to net-zero emissions possible. There’s a business case to be made for mitigating climate change as well. When the California utility PG&E declared bankruptcy last month, The Wall Street Journal called it “the first major corporate casualty of climate change,” and called it a “wake-up call” for other companies in how they think about climate risks.
Amazon isn’t alone in changing its practices to mitigate climate change. General Mills is changing the way it’s farming, and last year a group of 21 tech companies including Salesforce, Bloomberg, Uber, and HP announced an alliance “dedicated to harnessing the power of emerging technologies and the fourth industrial revolution to help reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across all economic sectors and ensure a climate turning point by 2020.”
Amazon declined to comment beyond its blog post to Fortune.
