Amazon Code Of Business Conduct And Ethics – This is part 2 of my ethics review of Amazon and it will cover the subject of Amazon’s ethics and social responsibility at length. (Part 1 focuses on the Amazon Dash program.) I think the best way to start is to see what Amazon has to say about itself in its latest sustainability report.
Amazon released its 124-page 2020 sustainability report just a few months ago, so the information is pretty up-to-date. Although the report is long, it is very thin on content, as most of it is taken up by cute but meaningless graphics and there is a lot of repetition.
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I’m used to reading sustainability (/social responsibility) reports at this point and have an idea of what to do. Note: book by Hans Rosling,
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Not a useful primer for scientists unaccustomed to analyzing and drawing conclusions from such data. Here are my notes from my reading of Amazon’s 2020 sustainability report; I was also looking at the UPS report to keep things in perspective.
It’s good that Amazon is finally doing something, but the company could really start to address the carbon footprint of parcel shipping.
In 2017, we continued to expand our rental laboratory – the UPS fleet of approximately 9,100 alternative fuel and advanced technology vehicles.
I’m not saying UPS is great, but even by this 2017 benchmark, Amazon seems to be lagging behind.
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…with 10,000 new cars on the road by 2022 and all 100,000 cars on the road by 2030. This is expected to save millions of tonnes of carbon by 2030. – Amazon Sustainability Report 2020
From Amazon’s aggressive promotion of this, it’s clear that this is the crown jewel in their plan. This is a perfect marketing strategy as the brand’s minivans have and will continue to attract a lot of media attention
Directly to our neighborhoods. This is probably the best part of Amazon’s report, but like the 2040 climate goal, it is based on the distant future and should have been addressed sooner.
Amazon’s commitment here is to have 10% of the vans on the road by 2022 and all 100,000 vans in operation by 2030. Bezos has previously said that Amazon will have 100,000 electric cars on the road by 2024.
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Amazon clearly has a bad reputation, and the electric van plan is an attempt to fix that image – which is good. But it seems that the fixes outlined in Amazon’s 2020 report are designed to be implemented as slowly as possible (while obviously looking as good as possible). Case in point: Let’s take a closer look at Amazon’s carbon footprint!
You know how air travel is often cited for its high carbon footprint? Well, move over airplanes (especially since the lockdown began) because the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) sector is now responsible for a larger share of carbon emissions than air travel. Since 2013, the percentage of global carbon emissions attributed to the ICT sector has increased from 2.4% to 3.7% (compared to about 2.5% for air travel). Cloud computing is a big part of it, and who dominates cloud computing? Not Google or Microsoft, but Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest cloud service provider, with a growing network of data centers that are often located in locations with dirty forms of energy.
Northern Virginia is now known as Data Center Alley because data centers there handle about 70% of Internet traffic. The area’s main electricity supplier, Dominion Energy, has increased its reliance on fracked gas for power generation and appears to be in no rush to increase the percentage of renewable energy in the mix. According to a report by Greenpeace Click Clean in Virginia:
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As of 2017, AWS appears to have backed away from its 100% renewable commitment and increased its already massive operations in Virginia by 59% without any additional renewable energy supplies. AWS itself is an unwitting partner in Dominion’s growth strategy, due to the gravitational pull it has created among other data center operators who want to offer their customers a direct connection to AWS’s massive Virginia operation.
The Greenpeace Click Clean report gave Amazon a C, compared to an A for Google and a B for Microsoft. Also note that while Google and Microsoft have made good progress in reducing their carbon footprints, Amazon’s total carbon footprint has increased by 15% from 44.4 million tons of CO2 in just one year.
Let’s be clear: as the largest retailer on the planet, Amazon should have offset all of its carbon emissions a decade ago, or at least after the 2016 Paris Agreement. Several of the companies I’ve featured here and on my sister site (Ethical Exchange) have offset their carbon footprint over the years (eg Clif Bar). This could be done through non-profit organizations that protect and cultivate forests around the world, and if the Amazon wanted to do it, it could be organized very quickly.
I touched on this in the first post (How ethical is Amazon?) – faster shipping means more carbon footprint and a stressful work environment for the workers involved. Faster shipping is central to Amazon’s business model—many customers pay Amazon Prime membership fees primarily for fast, free shipping.
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But aside from the carbon footprint of fast shipping, what about the packaging material? There were several factors that made me ditch Amazon.com for online shopping, and one of them was the amount of packaging that Amazon kept stuffing into their boxes and bubble wrap. Here’s an excerpt from Amazon’s 2020 Sustainability Report:
We are working to source 100% of the wood fiber in this package from responsibly managed forests or recycled sources.”
Work on…?! We all know how much cardboard Amazon produces – why on earth hasn’t it all been 100% post-consumer recycled over the years? Amazon has been shipping products for over two decades and is only now announcing that they are working to fix this. FFS.
This reflects Amazon’s actions on carbon footprint and delivery vehicles – all future promises and a very late start. Amazon could have become a leader in sustainable packaging and carbon-neutral shipping, but the fact that it hasn’t says a lot about the company’s priorities, such as the Amazon Dash project.
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Ignoring the current 21% of defense spending (a topic for another post), note that 39% of US federal taxes come from individuals and only 5% from corporations. Most of us pay taxes at least twice – once when we earn it, and a second time when we spend it and/or earn an investment (in fact, check out this article on ethical investing!). Meanwhile, Amazon Corp (and Bezos personally) is paying less than that.
This topic of tax evasion by Amazon has been discussed many times, so I will only refer you to this 2019 article covering the study of the largest companies in the world by Fair Tax Mark.
The report named Amazon, run by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, as the worst offender. The group is said to have paid just $3.4 billion in taxes on its earnings to date, despite generating $960.5 billion in revenue and $26.8 billion in profits. Fair Tax Mark said this meant Amazon’s effective tax rate was 12.7% over the decade, when the US headline tax rate was 35% for most of that period.
That extra $5 billion would be useful in supporting schools, hospitals, and more. If Amazon really wanted to improve during the pandemic (as stated in the opening of the 2020 sustainability report) a good way to do it would be to pay its fair share of taxes.
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Well – another update because the tax situation in 2020 is actually worse. Everyone knows Amazon is killing it during the pandemic, but it seems amazing that the corporate tax rate is actually going down! Here’s an update on Amazon’s first quarter of 2020 from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy:
And that increase in revenue translated into $3.3 billion in pretax income for the quarter. If the company pays the statutory 21 percent U.S. corporate tax rate on that income, that means about $700 million in federal tax revenue in the first three months of this year — but since Congress has allowed Amazon to do almost anything to refuse of its income tax liability, Amazon’s federal tax bill for the quarter will likely be closer to zero than $700 million. Despite reporting $29 billion in U.S. revenue over the past three years, the company reported zero current federal income taxes for the same period. (In fact, the company’s three-year total federal tax return was negative—a $102 million refund!)
I was originally hopeful about Amazon and only gradually stopped buying things on Amazon.com over the past decade as I learned more about the company.
Amazon seems to be doing less because it will be acceptable to the masses and buy more time by focusing on promises for 2030 and
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