Amazon Green

Amazon Green is an initiative for a sustainable future. By reforesting, recycling, and innovating on compostable packaging, Green generates revenue while creating a brand image focused on social good.

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Inspiration

Amazon Green was inspired by the world's growing need to take the environment into consideration. Industry-leading companies around the globe have turned their focus to offsetting the damage inflicted over decades of global warming and toxic waste production. We wanted Amazon, a business known for innovation and creativity, to take one further step to not only reduce negative effects on the planet but to introduce positive changes into their environment.

In 2019, Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge—a commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across our business by 2040. However, these plans were quickly derailed by COVID-19. As the rate of orders and demands for disposable, safe packaging soared, so did the waste cardboard and plastic created by Amazon. Amazon Green aims to get the company back on track with their goal with the ambition to possibly reach the goal even sooner, by 2035.

What it does

Amazon Green targets these problems by increasing the funding for recycling-based partnerships, investing in compostable and biodegradable packaging technology, and reforesting major national parks and forests around the world to offset their operations.

We plan to gamify Amazon Green as a platform, allowing users to see their impact on the environment by providing visually interactive API maps. We also have ideas for future technology to measure the surface area of cardboard and paper being returned to Amazon for recycling and allocating customers points based on their contribution which can then be spent for hygiene products and sustainably designed home goods.

Amazon Green features a loyalty and reward program where customers can collect "leaves" for purchasing eco-friendly products. For every 1000 leaves, Amazon Green will plant a tree on behalf of the customer and to reward customers for making green choices, customers can redeem their leaves for exclusive discounts on their next purchase. To track their progress, customers have a virtual pet tree that they can view, which grows to reflect customers' eco-friendly choices and their progress towards planting another tree. Explore the tree icon in the top right corner and "purchase" products to see how the program works.

For every tree planted, a tree marker will appear on the map at the bottom of the page. For this particular initiative, we chose to focus on Yellowstone National Park and all trees will only be planted in the marked area (green circle).

How we built it

Our project is built with HTML on a Bootstrap template with custom CSS and JavaScript sheets to make the webpage stand out. We relied heavily on the leaflet.js map API created by Volodymyr Agafonkin and used it to place custom markers into the radius of Yellowstone Park.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we ran into was time. As our initial group backed out of the project just two days ago, Winny and I had to return to our starting steps and come up with a new idea. In the span of the last 48 hours we started a new GitHub repo, put together all the code, conducted market research on Amazon, and designed our presentation slides. It was a great learning experience for us to manage our project efficiently so we could keep realistic goals while also fulfilling the brief for this case competition.

Our secondary challenge was figuring out a way to convert our point system into Amazon discount rewards while also updating the number of trees that will be planted for every milestone. Not only did we have to re-familiarize ourselves with JavaScript, but our group also struggled with our mathematical calculations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully implemented a points tracking system that also modifies the interactive map by adding tree pointers to help the customer see their visual impact on the reforestation initiative. The ideation and code was all done from scratch by the two of us with the help of the mapping API, and we're happy with how it looks, especially as a part of the website as a whole.

What we learned

We learned about the enormous scale on which Amazon operates and the importance of designing plans which can be carried out instead of suggesting massive, vague goals with no implementation. We also learned a lot about the value of gamification and interactive content, especially for a business like Amazon where the target audience is scattered. Creating a personal connection with a company which seems impersonal and distant will allow users to not only view Amazon as a warmer and more friendly brand, it'll also give them more awareness of their impact on the environment and the importance of acting now to preserve the future.

What's next for Amazon Green

Next, Amazon Green would work with Prime to carry over an account and point management system which is stored in the database so users can access it by logging into their account. There's also potential for the map to be its own page with hover overlays that give users information about where they planted the trees and the climate in those regions, YouTube videos of Amazon employees planting the trees and bringing cardboard to recycling centers, etc.

On the technical side, accessibility is an important consideration to improve the user experience. On top of making sure our website is WCAG complaint and follow accessibility best practices, we would also make sure that the site is mobile responsive.

Contributors

Nayana Agrawal: nayana.agrawal@mail.utoronto.ca Winny Peng: winny.peng@mail.utoronto.ca

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