The vast Illinois factory floor that will produce electric delivery vans for Amazon.com Inc. is starting to fill up. Battery and chassis assembly here. Tire storage there. A titanic, three-story metal press. Sometime next year, the plant’s workers will complete the first van. A decade later, if all goes according to plan, van No. 100,000 will roll off the line, completing the biggest electric vehicle purchase in history. By the time Amazon has all these zero-emission vehicles on the road, around 2030, it will eliminate an estimated 4 million metric tons of CO2 now belched out each year by gasoline-powered vans and trucks.
That would wipe out a small company’s entire contribution to the emissions warming the planet. But for the largest online retailer, the savings represent roughly 8% of its carbon footprint. How Amazon hopes to tackle the other 92%—as well as any other emissions the fast-growing company tacks on in the coming years—is an open question.
Amazon last year committed to zeroing out its carbon footprint by 2040, or eliminating the greenhouse gas emissions caused by its activities. The challenge is daunting. The company is increasingly transporting its own goods from warehouses to customer doorsteps, acquiring the planes, long-haul trucks, and delivery vans that make its aggressive delivery promises possible. Its cloud computing division is building giant, electricity-hungry server farms from Sweden to South Africa. Through contract manufacturers, it’s a major builder of consumer electronics, household essentials, and apparel. Last year its emissions per dollar of merchandise declined, but its total emissions grew.
Amazon concedes there isn’t a clear path to that zero-carbon goal today. “We’re going to invest a lot, and we’re going to invent along the way,” says Kara Hurst, the company’s first sustainability director and a vice president.
It’s a big admission about a big goal: There’s no specific plan for how to reach it. In some ways, it’s a perfect example of what happens when the build-the-plane-as-you’re-flying-it tech culture so celebrated in American business intersects with an unyielding scientific crisis. Amazon has been a pioneer again and again—and now it’s gunning to be the first company that figures out how to slow climate change at the same time it moves millions of items around the planet.