What Amazon Isn’t Telling You: The Company’s Big Transportation Emissions Omission

Amazon prides itself on data-driven decision-making. The company encourages employees to dive deep into metrics, analyze root causes, and make data-informed decisions. But despite operating one of the world’s largest logistics operations, Amazon fails to fully disclose the climate and public health impacts of its shipping and deliveries–including key data on emissions that investors, employees, customers, and communities deserve to see. 

Here’s what Amazon isn’t telling you.

Pollution from Amazon’s shipping and deliveries is growing–and hidden

Amazon’s public climate disclosures ignore the lion’s share of pollution its shipping and deliveries cause. The company focuses narrowly on carbon dioxide while omitting other harmful pollutants like fine particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides. It also fails to break out emissions by transportation mode or to detail how much pollution comes from operations it directly controls versus outsourced carriers like UPS or FedEx.

While Amazon celebrates its 20,000 electric delivery vans, this figure is misleading without full context. The company is projected to need more than 400,000 vans by 2030, meaning that even with its goal of 100,000 electric vehicles, more than two-thirds of its fleet would still rely on fossil fuels. A 2023 report found that less than 1% of Amazon’s reported deliveries in the U.S. are made using electric vehicles (EVs) or other clean mobility modes. 

Meanwhile, in 2019-2023, Stand.earth data analysis reveals Amazon’s shipping and delivery emissions skyrocketed more than 75% from 3.3 million metric tons to 5.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. Across its shipping and deliveries, this climate-wrecking pollution includes:

• +67% U.S. inbound and domestic air freight pollution
• +26% U.S. inbound and domestic marine shipping
• +51% U.S. heavy-duty trucking and drayage
• +195% global last-mile delivery vans

This is just one share of the pollution growth Amazon’s fails to account for in its public disclosures.

Who Pays the Price? Communities Already Burdened by Pollution

Amazon’s logistics expansion disproportionately harms low-income communities and communities of color. Studies show the company frequently locates fulfillment centers and delivery hubs in vulnerable neighborhoods, exposing residents to diesel truck traffic, poor air quality, and associated health risks like asthma and heart disease.

Port communities are also hit hard. Amazon relies heavily on ocean shipping, yet provides little data on shipping routes, port operations, or the types of fuels its carriers use. These omissions obscure the company’s impact on frontline communities and prevent accountability.

Amazon’s Disclosure Gap: Falling Behind Peers

Other logistics giants like UPS and FedEx already provide more comprehensive breakdowns of their transportation-related emissions. In contrast, Amazon only reports limited Scope 3 emissions—for example, it includes value chain emissions only from Amazon-branded products, which make up roughly 1% of online sales. Emissions from contracted delivery services and third-party vendors are left out.

According to Proxy Preview, Amazon “remains a laggard” on Scope 3 disclosures, despite growing shareholder pressure to improve. This lack of transparency not only hampers emissions reductions—it also makes it difficult for investors to assess long-term climate risk.

What transparency looks like

Amazon can and should report far more. Greater transparency is one way the company can take responsibility for its serious climate impact. Some specific steps the company should take include:

• A full, complete, and comprehensive report of Amazon’s overall Scope 1-3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and criteria pollutant emissions from transportation, broken out by transportation mode and carriers
• Pollution metrics beyond carbon dioxide (e.g., methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases, sulfur dioxide, fine and ultra fine particulate matter, neoformed compounds, etc.)
• Reporting on warehouse siting and public health impacts
• Submissions to independent corporate climate accountability tracking programs (e.g., CDP, SBTi, etc.)
• Requiring vendors to publish and meet zero-emission plans by 2030

On May 21, Amazon’s shareholders will vote on key resolutions calling for improved emissions disclosure, especially around Scope 3 and data center energy use. Investors know that meaningful climate action begins with full transparency.

If Amazon wants to lead on climate, it must stop hiding the data—and start telling the full story.