Are Rivian Electric Vans Enough To Make You Feel Better About Amazon's Environmental Impact?
An Anonymous Coward writes:
Amazon's recent rollout of Rivian electric delivery vehicles represented a milestone in the company's work toward reducing emissions. Starting in major cities, including Chicago, Dallas, San Diego, and -- no surprise -- Seattle, Amazon plans to have the vehicles in more than 100 cities shortly and will expand to more than 100,000 vehicles across the U.S. by 2030. While Rivian had the inside track as a company that Amazon has invested in, the EV company will have to feature more than just electrification to compete long-term in an industry where electrification will start to become the norm.
[...] For example, according to Amazon's just-released sustainability report for 2021, it delivered over 100 million packages in Europe using a fleet of over 3,000 electric delivery vans and other zero-emission vehicles last year. And in the dense streets of Manhattan, the company delivered 30 million packages using cargo bikes and people on foot. And those packages are far less wasteful than they've been in the past as the company has implemented options such as programs that ship products without packaging, Climate-Friendly certifications for sustainably designed products, and even using machine learning algorithm improvements to pack products more efficiently into smaller boxes that allow for more efficient use of cargo storage.
But much of the quest to reduce the carbon footprint of transportation will take place via modes of transportation that are not seen by customers. For example, the company is a member of an industry group seeking to drive the adoption of sustainable aviation fuel and helped create another to advance zero-emissions technologies and fuels for use in shipping vessels. [...]
[...] The company's promise to be a net-zero business by 2040 forms the central tenet of The Climate Pledge, a group Amazon co-founded that now includes over 300 organizations that have pledged to achieve the milestone by 2040, 10 years before The Paris Accord deadline.
What do you think? Greenwashing, or getting out in front of what it sees as inevitable laws to be enacted? (Or maybe a little from Column A and a little from Column B?)
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