Amazon

Amazon is a company that is trying to lessen the impact they have on the environment. They feel that they are helping to reduce the impact convent shopping has on the environment by offering shopping through the Internet instead of going to a shopping center and they offer almost everything you can find at a mall on their web site. They also ask for customer feedback so they know how easy their products were to get out of their packaging. Amazon is working hard to cut down their imprint on the environment by asking their employee’s to help with figuring out ways to save money and packaging of products and the semi trailers. Amazon is not only working on better receiving of products, they are working on cutting down their fuel costs, their consumption of kilowatt-hours, and recycling costs. They have a team put together and this team goes around to each site to discuss how to save the environment and the company money. In Hebron, Kentucky, they found a way to load semi trailers by reconfiguring the loading process, thus they save more than $ 3 million dollars and 300,000 gallons of fuel each year (www.amazon.com). In Pennsylvania, they found that one of their sites (they have two sites) was purchasing pallets each week while their other site was disposing of pallets each week. They decided to load the unused pallets and ship them to the site that needed them thus saving the company more than $100,000 each year. In Kentucky, the team found that lights were staying on during the weekend hours in areas that were not being used. Team Kaizen decided to turn off over 34 lights thus reducing 450,000 kilowatt-hours in this one facility (www.amazon.com). In Kansas, they determined that the conveyor belts did not need to run continuously, they installed timers on them and are now using 30% less kilowatt-hours of power per year. In Kentucky, they decided to purchase forklifts, they had none before to unload semi trailers, this way semi trailers can be double stacked and they are saving 1.1 million traveling miles and 175,000 gallons of fuel (www.amazon.com). In Wales, they decided to install larger skylights and windows to improve lighting in work areas, thus using 40% fewer kilowatt-hours of power each month. In Milton Keynes, England; Gourock, Scotland; and Swansea, Wales, they began asking vendors to deliver their products in reusable totes thus cutting down on the cardboard box usage. In Germany, they installed fluorescent light bulbs thus reducing over 10,000 kilowatt-hours of power usage. In France, they decided to sort recycling; as a result it recovers more than 60% of recycle disposal costs (www.amazon.com). In Scotland, they found that their hot water was heating, even in the summer months when it was not needed; the team updated their hot water system to gas and now has a yearly reduction of thousands of cubic meters of gas and kilowatt-hours of power usage (www.amazon.com). Amazon is working hard at becoming environmentally friendly throughout their entire business. From recycling, better lighting systems, packaging solutions, and the use of skylights and windows and they are achieving this goal. Their corporate offices in Seattle, Washington and Munich, Germany have achieved the LEED Gold certification for the sustainable design and construction materials. LEED stands for, “Leadership in Energy and Environmentally Design,” and this recognizes the industry’s most environmentally conscious projects. Amazon is taking great strides in becoming and moving forward to ensure their business is friendly to our earth and they are making strides in reusing materials to become cost effective (www.amazon.com).

Reference
www.amazon.com