Amazon Sustainability Ambassadors

Ambassadors in our operations organisation focus on sustainability projects that help sites reduce carbon and operational waste. One example comes from an Ambassador team in Poland, where members redesigned the waste segregation process in their fulfilment centre, improving waste recycling rates by more than 90 %. At a fulfilment centre in France, team members installed a food waste composter for associates to use at the end of their break times, generating compost that our associates are able to take home for their gardens. This solution is now being tested for adoption across our fulfilment centres in Canada. An Ambassador team in Italy identified the challenge of recycling personal protective equipment used to keep employees safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team found a waste services provider and set up a process to collect the used equipment, turning hard hats, gloves and safety shoes into materials used for soundproofing walls and soft flooring for children’s play areas.

Ambassadors in our corporate offices also have a unique opportunity to launch ideas with data-driven analysis using Amazon technology. After auditing waste at our global headquarters in Seattle, Ambassadors developed a proposal to improve waste sorting using DeepLens – a deep learning-enabled video camera from AWS. A team of Amazon employees built a data set and model that used DeepLens’ object detection capabilities to identify the waste items being discarded and deploy built-in audio to help people identify the correct bin to use for a given item.