How Does Amazon Maintain Such A Miraculously Small Carbon Footprint? It Cheats.
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Usually, the biggest chunk of a retailers carbon footprint comes from all the products it sells. And thats where Amazon has the biggest gaps. Just take all the greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere from manufacturing the things a retailer sells. For everything with a plug, add in the electricity they eat up when theyre on. Then tack on the emissions from eventually throwing them away.
For that lifecycle of consumer products, Targets report, which it makes public, showed triple the amount of carbon emissions that Amazons did. That represents 37.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide more than Amazon, the equivalent of just over 8 million cars driven for a year. And thats for a year Amazon racked up well over $100 billion more in sales than Target. How is that possible? Well, Amazon counts only products labeled with its private brands the Echo Dots, Kindles, and AmazonBasics staples, for example. Those, the company has told Congress, total 1 percent of its online sales.
Theres another 39 percent of sales that Amazon should be counting if it were using the same accounting as its peers. These are the products that Amazon buys from manufacturers and sells directly to the customer. Theyre made by other companies think Levis, Nintendo, Frigidaire but their product listings say ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Target and Walmart stock these same brands. But unlike Target and Walmart, Amazon doesnt count the emissions that go into making these products or those that come out of them.
So these products might even be labeled Climate Pledge Friendly on Amazon like a box of Kleenex tissues. But the company doesnt actually count them toward its Climate Pledge. (The remaining 60 percent of Amazons sales come from third-party vendors who use Amazon as an online marketplace; Amazon doesnt count those emissions either, but thats more of a gray area. Amazon spokesperson Luis Davila said third-party sellers control their own carbon emissions accounting. Walmart, which also has third-party sellers hawking wares on its website, says it does count those products in its carbon footprint. Target wouldnt comment on whether it counts third-party sales.)
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https://grist.org/accountability/how-amazon-is-drastically-undercounting-its-carbon-footprint/