Amazon Touts Packaging Achievements in 2025 Sustainability Report
Ecommerce giant Amazon has released its 2025 Sustainability Report, and packaging figures prominently in the company’s efforts to achieve more sustainable operations.
Amazon says its packaging strategy is rooted in four pillars:
- Avoid shipping products with additional delivery packaging and instead ship products in their original packaging.
- Optimize—Using automation and AI to determine the minimum, lightest, right-sized packaging needed.
- Transform—Prioritizing household-recyclable materials and reducing single-use plastic.
- Innovate—Working across public and private sectors to create more sustainable packaging solutions and improve recycling infrastructure globally.
“An important enabler of packaging optimization is our regionalization efforts in the U.S., which positions inventory closer to customers and helps reduce the number of handling points and shorten delivery routes,” Amazon says. “This effort increases the speed of delivery to our customers and enables the use of lighter packaging materials, such as flexible paper packaging, which is up to 90% lighter than comparable cardboard boxes.”
Amazon says its 2025 packaging achievements include:
- Making 11% of global shipments without additional Amazon packaging as part of the company’s Ships in Product Packaging program. In 2025, Amazon qualified 28 million unique products for the program globally.
- Avoiding 288 million single-use plastic bags by retrofitting automated packaging machines across North America. This figure was up from 134 million single-use plastic bags avoided in 2024.
- In North America, 73% of shipments were recyclable in household waste streams, up from 63% in 2024.
“We tailor our approach to replace single-use plastics with recyclable alternatives in response to country-specific challenges,” Amazon notes. “These efforts are being expanded to include shipments from Egypt, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. In cases where eliminating single-use plastics is not yet feasible, we work to increase the proportion of recycled content in our plastic materials.”
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