Innovate, collaborate, scale: Inside Amazon’s approach to decarbonising its global network of buildings

When you think of Amazon, your first thought might be of an online store. But we're also a physical retailer, a cloud computing provider, a logistics company, a film studio, a grocery store, and more. This diversity is reflected in our vast real estate portfolio: thousands of buildings spread across more than 60 countries, encompassing over 20 different building types.

What you might also not consider is the role these buildings play in our efforts to address climate change. According to the Carbon Leadership Forum, buildings and construction account for 40% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. When it comes to decarbonising buildings, we focus on two critical areas: the materials and methods used in construction, and the energy consumption and operational impacts throughout a building's lifecycle. At Amazon, we're tackling these challenges and working to harness our buildings' potential as part of our goal to achieve The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach net-zero carbon emission across our operations by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement.

Our wide variety of buildings presents a challenge as well as an opportunity to make meaningful change and reduce emissions, including embodied carbon from building materials and improving energy and overall building efficiency across our buildings’ footprint.

A fulfilment centre operates differently than a grocery store, which differs from a corporate office, a film studio or a data centre. And while each has unique characteristics, they share fundamental similarities in construction materials and buildings systems such as lighting and air conditioning. This means we take a multifaceted approach, tailoring strategies to each building type's specific needs, while also applying standardised methods and learnings at scale, across our entire network.

We're utilising innovative technologies and collaborating with partners, including Climate Pledge Fund companies, to accelerate progress and drive our approach.

We focus on five key areas when it comes to decarbonising our buildings: (1) prioritise carbon-free energy, (2) increase energy efficiency, (3) use lower carbon refrigerants, (4) utilise lower carbon construction materials, and (5) reduce onsite water consumption and waste generation.

Improving in each category requires constant innovation and investment in new technology as well as continuous testing and learning in order to help us refine our approach, and guide future development.

Here are just a few of our decarbonisation projects that we’re currently testing:

Over the past five years, we have achieved significant reductions in embodied carbon across our fulfilment centres through initiatives focused on design optimisation, operational efficiency, and the adoption of innovative technologies.

In Sacramento, California, we built North America's first International Living Future Institute (ILFI) Zero Carbon Certified logistics facility. This facility, which does not use on-site fossil fuels for operations, not only features lower-carbon concrete but also incorporates energy-efficient conveyor systems. These systems have been optimised with high-efficiency motors, low-friction belts, and low-friction rollers which reduce the energy consumption of the equipment by 38%.

We’ve begun incorporating mass-timber components in our corporate offices, which is a lower-carbon engineered wood product that can replace carbon-intensive materials like steel and concrete. For example, our second headquarters in Virginia, US, uses 70-foot-long glue-laminated mass timber beams to support meeting centre ceilings, lowering the embodied carbon of the building. This building also matches 100% of the electricity consumed from renewable energy and features on-site water recycling, making it the largest newly constructed LEED Platinum certified building in the world.

In our grocery stores, we're implementing significant improvements to our refrigeration systems. Refrigerants like hydrofluorocarbon (HFCs) can be one of the most significant pollutants and trap thousands of times more heat in the atmosphere than CO2. Our Amazon Fresh grocery store in Seattle, Washington—the world’s first ILFI Zero Carbon Certified grocery store—features a natural CO2-based refrigeration system that uses carbon dioxide as a refrigerant instead of synthetic chemicals with higher global warming potential.

We’ve found ways to implement sustainability in entertainment venues such as the Climate Pledge Arena, in Washington, US, which Amazon helped renovate and restore through our collaboration with the Oak View Group. The arena, named after the Climate Pledge, is the first ILFI Zero Carbon Certified arena in the world that has sustainability features such as an electric-powered Zamboni, as well as ice made of captured rainwater to help reduce water use—an NHL first. The arena also matches 100% of its electricity consumption with renewable energy, and boasts energy-efficient systems and lower impact refrigerants.

In our data centres, we're making significant strides in reducing embodied carbon and are testing alternative materials like slag-rich cement and calcined clays, to potentially reduce the carbon footprint further. So far, we’ve built 36 data centres with 20% lower-carbon concrete, and we’re now requiring that all new data centres have 35% lower embodied carbon. We are also continually working to optimise water consumption by using real-time data to identify leaks, piloting new treatment technologies, and exploring operational changes, such as installing sensors and alerts to track water use and detect anomalies. These efforts improved AWS's global data centre water use effectiveness to 0.18 litres of water per kilowatt-hour (L/kWh) in 2023 from 0.19 L/kWh in 2022—a 5% improvement year over year and a 28% improvement since 2021.

Our real impact comes from scaling these innovations and solutions. Before we start a new building project, we look for opportunities to repurpose existing building shells which, depending on the facility, can reduce the embodied carbon of a new project by thousands of tons of carbon. Over 80% of Amazon’s grocery stores and a majority of our corporate office spaces were built in existing buildings.

Meanwhile, we conducted over 200 boots-on-the-ground energy audits this year, to gather detailed information on energy efficiency opportunities in our existing assets. This data informs our future upgrade programmes and helps us optimise operational performance.

We've also deployed nearly 300 onsite solar installations across our facilities in EU, Asia, and North America which can generate enough solar electricity to power over 129,000 EU homes (or over 45,000 US homes). We are also investing in new carbon-free energy sources and have recently signed agreements to support the development of nuclear energy projects.

Across the board, Amazon’s retail businesses will be switching over to lower-carbon natural refrigerants, with all the new Whole Foods Market stores using only natural refrigerants for food refrigeration starting in 2025. We're also supporting a program by the North America Sustainable Refrigeration Council to train technicians on the next generation of refrigeration equipment.

These projects are just the beginning. Through our Climate Pledge Fund, we're investing in over 20 companies working on building-related solutions. This includes new investments in Paebbl, which turns CO2 into carbon-storing building materials, and 14Trees, which accelerates the production and delivery of lower-carbon buildings with its 3D printing technology. The Climate Pledge Fund has also invested in start-ups Brimstone and CarbonCure to further decarbonise concrete and Electra, to decarbonise steel – both essential materials in building construction.

We’re expanding our efforts by directly collaborating within the industry. We often work closely with suppliers, industry bodies, and government agencies to overcome technological and regional constraints and accelerate decarbonisation at scale. For example, we're collaborating with the Department of Energy to develop more efficient air-conditioning equipment and helping to define the United Kingdom's Net-Zero Carbon building programme. We're also working with regional supply chains to increase the availability of lower carbon construction materials, such as our collaborations with RMI to define industry-leading requirements and our efforts on the Sustainable Steel Buyers Platform to advance lower-emissions steel solutions.

We’re making progress across our real-estate portfolio—and we’re just getting started. To learn more about our commitment to The Climate Pledge, check out our latest sustainability report. If your company is interested in sustainability resources, we encourage you to check out the recently launched Amazon Sustainability Exchange. The exchange provides a variety of resources for companies seeking to build a more sustainable future including our building decarbonisation guide.