At Amazon we are constantly looking for ways to further reduce our environmental impact. This spans our company – including things like our wind and solar farms, innovative building design, Frustration-Free Packaging, support of the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan and initiatives like the “I Want to Be Recycled” public service campaign. With our growth and current scale, we can put our inventive culture to work on further moving the needle on sustainability issues. Here's a bit more about a few of those things we're already doing.
In 2014 we made a long-term commitment to achieve 100% renewable energy usage for our global AWS infrastructure. We have since announced four wind and solar farms that will deliver more than 1.6 million megawatt hours per year of additional renewable energy into the electric grids that supply AWS data centers. We announced that as of April 2015, approximately 25% of the power consumed by our AWS infrastructure comes from renewable energy sources, and we intend to reach 40% by the end of 2016. Our Amazon Wind Farm Fowler Ridge came online in January 2016 and we’re excited as our other projects continue to develop.
We continue to pursue e-commerce ready packaging and Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging – to promote easy-to-open, 100% recyclable packaging and to ship products in their own packages without additional shipping boxes. These initiatives have grown to include more than 1.2 million products over time and have eliminated more than 36,000 tons of excess packaging just in 2015.
And this Earth Day, Amazon Studios is working with the Ad Council and Scholastic for Keep America Beautiful’s “I Want to Be Recycled” public service campaign. This initiative promotes fun and engaging recycling lessons through Amazon Original Kids Series Creative Galaxy and Annedroids. Check out the
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Our employees around the world are also getting involved in their communities to celebrate Earth Day – cleaning up parks, planting trees, and raising awareness on recycling and other environmental issues. For example, employees in Cork, Ireland, are planting trees in the community to celebrate both their site's 10th anniversary and Earth Day. Associates in Cagliari, Sardinia, are working with a local charity to take a group of disabled children to a nearby nature reserve. And a team in Tianjin, China, is hosting a “Green Traffic Day” and encouraging associates to come to work by using public transport, a bicycle, or walking (here in Seattle more than half our employees walk, bike or ride public transport to work every day – a benefit of our unique urban campus).
We're excited about our efforts across the company, and we'll continue working hard on new programs in years to come.
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