We are proud to announce our expanded collaboration with Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an international charity dedicated to creating a circular economy. As a strategic partner of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Network, we will work to leverage Amazon’s reach, technology and innovation capabilities, as well as the Foundation’s domain expertise, to launch and scale circular economy solutions.
A circular economy contributes to addressing climate change, biodiversity loss and other global challenges by decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources. The Foundation works to create a circular economy that aims to eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials (keeping them at their highest value), and regenerate nature.
Amazon’s commitment to sustainability includes: The climate promisewhich we co-founded in 2019 to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. A circular economy is essential to achieving this goal and is a priority in all aspects of Amazon’s business, from packaging to products to data centers.
One focus of the cooperation will be the certification of products with circular properties. Together with the Foundation, we work with two certification organizations: the NSF, which develops public health standards and services that help protect the environment, and International and Scientific Certification Systems Global (SCS Global).
The goal is to develop rigorous third-party certifications that recognize important circular attributes of products and encourage and reward conscious design that supports the circular economy.
The goal of these certifications is to provide customers with the information they need to make a more circular choice. They will also encourage brands, OEMs, suppliers, retailers and e-commerce platforms to develop products designed around circular economy principles.
One such certification is the Standard for recycled content for electrical and electronic equipment. The standard was introduced in May 2023 as a certification extension to SCS Global’s widely used Recycled Content Standard, which verifies the overall percentage of recycled materials in these products against specified minimum thresholds for achieving both material usage and specific product type. Products must also contain more than one post-consumer recycled content to earn certification, encouraging the use of more and different post-consumer materials.
These certifications are intended to qualify for inclusion in ours Climate Pledge Friendly program, which helps customers discover more sustainable products by labeling products with sustainability certifications. Working with the Foundation, we will continue to review and promote circularity certifications to establish industry-wide standards.
Additionally, the Foundation’s Plastics Initiative is working with reuse partners and experts to develop a vision for scaling returnable packaging systems. The Global Impact Computing teams at Amazon and AWS are supporting this work with future visualization and analytical modeling to show how scaled reuse systems can perform economically, ecologically, and experientially compared to single-use packaging.
“Circular economy initiatives are essential for us to achieve our Climate Pledge goal, and as with many aspects of sustainability, industry standards and collaboration are essential,” said Rich Loretto, Director of Circular Economy at Amazon. “The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has done great research and work to create frameworks that we can all work towards. Her advice will be extremely valuable as we work on our own initiatives, and her network will help ensure these initiatives can be scaled to have a greater impact across the industry.”
“We are excited to be collaborating with Amazon on a number of circular economy initiatives. The company’s impact, ability to innovate and ability to scale solutions mean there is tremendous scope for true transformational change,” said Joe Murphy, executive director of the network at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. “We have already started and we look forward to supporting their journey to the circular economy through our long-term collaboration.”
The success of circular economy initiatives depends to a large extent on collaboration, uptake and scale, and we look forward to bringing our Climate Pledge co-signatories together with the Foundation to stimulate the exchange of ideas and collective action.
It will kick off with a workshop hosted by the US Department of Energy that will focus on the transition to a circular economy for plastics. Climate Pledge signatories will partner with over 100 scientists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other companies to share ideas, opportunities, research and more.
learn more about Amazon’s sustainability efforts.
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