Amazon and Carbon Emissions: Your convenience is killing the planet, but it doesn’t have to be
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, most people in the UK know about this (not so little) retail giant called Amazon. Ask any Gen-Z (i.e. people aged 14–27 years old), most of them will tell you they shop on Amazon frequently, at least once in 4 weeks. This is also reflected in the revenue Amazon makes, with shoppers spending $443,000 every minute of the day, which amounts to $637 million every day. Many issues has been attributed to the rise of Amazon and the convenience and affordability that it brings to consumers, including the fast churning consumerist culture, drastic increase in carbon emissions, and the social cost that its supply chain creates. With all of them being very significant, one wonders if digital technologies can help mitigate some of the effects.
Carbon emissions, or Carbon Footprint, are “a representation of the effect on climate in terms of the total amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) that are produced, measured in units of CO2e as a result of the activities of an organization”. GHG is the largest causal factor of anthropogenic climate change, which is essentially an unusual acceleration of the shift in average weather conditions on Earth. It causes effects such as the rising of ocean level, increased frequencies of droughts and floods, loss of species, increased health risks, and food production issues. This further leads to issues in health, food provisioning, inequality and injustice, and even security issues due to these problems as resource becomes scarce. With such effects affecting the whole of humanity, obviously we should care about it and act now.
One of the leading methods in this transition towards sustainability is by increasing transparency, where businesses disclose or are forced to disclose their carbon emissions to the consumer. It is believed that by letting consumer know the carbon cost of their purchases, will lead consumer to buy products that emits less carbon. Currently, Amazon’s way of doing this is only to bury it in their corporate sustainability report. They do offer one solution for consumers to know if the products are sustainable or not, via the Climate Pledge Friendly label, where it applies to products that meets at least one sustainability related certification . However, it’s overly simplistic and doesn’t offer nuance or further explanation of which aspect of the product is sustainable. So it can easily greenwash consumers by only indicating that it meets a certain certification.
Traditionally, companies have been relying on environmental experts in estimating carbon emissions, and therefore can’t breakdown the footprint for each product because of the estimate being a bulk estimate. To solve this problem of trust and improve consumption nudging, one can look to various digital technologies to help, such as IoT, blockchain technologies, and remote sensing. The Internet of Things (IoT) is “an emerging paradigm that enables the communication between electronic devices and sensors through the internet in order to facilitate our lives.” It allows different processes to be tracked and viewed in near-real time. It’s been used in smart supply chain, connected health, connected car, smart city, and more industries. The tremendous amounts of data it collected can be used in big data, in which we can generate many insights into how our world works and keep track of things.
Blockchain technology is a way of storing data that doesn’t allow the data to be changed easily. So the users of this technology can have complete confidence over the trustworthiness of the data. It could potentially be used with IoT to provide a robust carbon account. With all these solutions, I propose that we can use RFID and blockchain to accurately count and display scope 1 emissions of Amazon, which is emissions that’s generated through business activities of the business.
RFID is a way to “identify objects, record metadata or control individual target through radio waves.”. It forms part of the IoT network. Amazon can attach RFID sensors to every part of their transport network, and track the footprint of every parcel. The tracking data can be uploaded to a blockchain, which then consumers can scrutinize. This carbon tracking data can be then populated onto the product listing page of Amazon. It can be a little number at the corner of the product icon communicating how much carbon emissions purchasing and getting this product delivered will generate. This then can nudge consumer choices.
The effectiveness of this carbon labelling has been thoroughly researched and the consumer research has shown that almost 60% of people will be more likely to buy a product with a label than one without. Successful examples of solutions similar to this can be found in the food industry. The nutritional labelling of food has reduced the consumption of fat and calories by 10% and 7% respectively, leading to a healthier population. So by the same concept, it should work for carbon emissions reduction, with consumer having similar prioritization of sustainability and food.
Despite the seemingly effective solution this presents, it could be quite a reductionistic view if we only looking through this rose-coloured lens. There are drawbacks and potential pitfalls that this solutions may not work. Starting with the responsiblisation of consumers, some research has shown that it might not be as effective as it once construed. Consumer might even push back against these efforts due to them feeling being vilified. It’s just a reformist approach when in reality to decarbonise it requires the reconfiguration approach, where we need to re-think our model of consumption to achieve sustainability.
There is also the problem of differing standards used to calculate carbon emissions. Sometimes the use of blockchain has also been shown that it creates even more carbon emissions, because of the large amount of electricity used. The use of RFID could contribute to even more electronic waste, although the use of reusable passive RFID might mitigate this problem.
If there’s only 1 thing to take away from this, is that there’s huge carbon emissions that’s produced by Amazon, and that it should be reduced. We can do this by using RFID and blockchain, to provide an easier way to buy products with less carbon emissions. But, the use of this solution may create more problems than it solves. It should still worth trying as the future of humanity depends on it.
tags: #digisoc2 ; #RFID ; #Amazon
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