8 more sustainable choices Amazon shoppers can make this Earth Month and beyond

An easy way to practice sustainability is probably sitting somewhere in your house right now. You can reuse your cardboard Amazon boxes for a variety of purposes, including crafting, storage, moving, and shipping.

Amazon boxes are curbside recyclable, so if you don’t need them, make sure to place them in your recycling bin. Just make sure to remove any plastic packaging first. Learn more ways to use your Amazon boxes.

On our end, we’re continuously working to reduce packaging and increase its recyclability.

Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly program helps customers discover and shop for more sustainable products. The program highlights over 1.4M products with sustainability features that support Amazon’s commitment to help preserve our natural world. We collaborate with over 50 trusted sustainability certifications to highlight a product's sustainability features, from Carbon Impact to Organic Content to Worker Well-being. Certifications include Fair Trade Certified, Cradle to Cradle, and Global Organic Textile Standard.

While searching for products on Amazon, look for the leaf icon and the sustainability features label to identify more sustainable products. By adding “Sustainability” to Your Interests in your Amazon account, Amazon can also recommend more Climate Pledge Friendly products as you shop.

If you’re a Prime member, you have the added convenience of consolidating your deliveries at checkout by selecting Amazon Day, or by choosing to have your items delivered in fewer trips to your address. With Amazon Day, you can also choose a specific day of the week to receive your deliveries.

These options are free for Prime members and help reduce the number of boxes used and delivery trips made. Last year, Prime members in the U.S. saved an estimated 490 million boxes and 450 million trips, resulting in lower carbon emissions on average.

If you’re not a Prime member, you can learn more about the many other benefits of Amazon Prime here.

We’re making it easier than ever to shop for items that can be delivered with a lower environmental impact. For example, you can now discover items that ship from facilities that are closer than average to your address– which reduces the distance these items travel to be delivered to you. On average, shipping an item from a closer warehouse emits less carbon compared to items that ship from farther distances.

Just look for “shorter shipping distance” messaging on the “Detail Page” of an item when browsing our store.

Have old or outdated electronics laying around that you’re no longer using? Or maybe it’s time to upgrade to a newer model but you don’t know how to responsibly recycle the old device? Send your old devices to the Amazon Trade-in program to potentially receive money back on an Amazon.com gift card and a discount to upgrade to a new device! Amazon Trade-in gives new life to old products by refurbishing them and reselling them, or recycling them if they can’t be resold.

Amazon Trade-in accepts many types of small electronics, including devices made by Amazon and many brand names found in households everywhere. Not in the market for a device upgrade but looking to clean out all those old cell phones and video games that are cluttering up valuable space at home? You can even send in those in for a gift card!

If your device isn’t eligible to be traded in, we’ll still recycle it for free. Simply package your device, use our prepaid UPS shipping label, and drop it off at any UPS location. Another option is that you can skip the packaging and labeling process and drop off products that you’re trading in at over 500 stores nationwide, include Whole Foods.

Curious about what happens to your old devices once you trade them in? Learn more here.

Similarly, Amazon is home to other types of affordable, pre-owned and refurbished products. Buying pre-owned can save you money and help extend the life of a device. These items have been professionally inspected, and may be available for up to 50% off the price of the same, brand-new item:

Amazon Fashion and Luxury Stores offer pre-loved designer bags and accessories by Celine, and more with Shopbop's Pre-Loved Edit, and additionally offers a carefully curated selection of pre-owned, luxury menswear and womenswear apparel and accessory styles, as well as lifestyle items and jewelry, from sought after brands, including Louis Vuitton, Dior, Fendi, Gucci, Prada, Thome Browne, Cartier and more from What Goes Around Comes Around, HBX Archives and myGemma in Luxury Stores at Amazon. In Rent the Runway’s brand store, you can also find pre-owned clothing from top designers such as Thakoon Collective, Nanushka, and Diane Von Furstenberg. With this selection, you can refresh your wardrobe with designer names for less and extend the life of quality clothing.

If a product qualifies, it will automatically begin to ship in its own packaging as the default, helping Amazon—and you—avoid excess packaging when possible.

The contents of your order will be just fine. In fact, there's an entire Packaging Innovation Lab in Seattle where we test a product’s original packaging to determine if it can be delivered safely without an Amazon box or bag.

In fact, 12% of Amazon shipments globally now arrive in their original packaging, and we’re working on growing that number.