Amazon is being publicly called out using street art protest that Black Lives Matter made popular. A message for Amazon and its CEO Andy Jassy was painted on Sixth Avenue in Seattle outside the company’s headquarters buildings. Cleaning started right away as the Seattle Department of Transportation worked to remove street graffiti near Amazon HQ. Stand.earth took credit for the street writing in a press release sent last week during Amazon’s ‘Prime Day’ campaign.
Amazon is a huge company. It has e-commerce, AWS, Amazon Prime, Alexa, logistics, devices, and more under its control. Amazon was specifically targeted by the environmental activist group for rolling back its Shipment Zero pledge in May. Thw Shipment Zero initiative was Amazon’s commitment to make 50% of its shipments net-zero carbon by 2030.
The day of the street art was also Amazon’s two-day Prime Day sales event in which the e-commerce giant reported was its largest sales day ever. The company said 375 million items were sold over the two days. The stenciled message across two lanes of the street was addressed to Jassy and read, “AMAZON: PRIME POLLUTER. #DELIVER CHANGE.”
The Seattle Department of Transportation sent a crew from the agency to pressure wash the message off the street. The message was neatly written and photographs were taken by drones. During the uprising protests and before streets have been used to write protest messages aimed at government abuse.
Amazon is working to get off the hot seat. It has vowed to reach carbon neutrality by 2040 and urged other companies to do the same through the Climate Pledge. Clean energy is important to the e-commerce giant.The company is paying for wind and solar energy to help power its operations. It says it is purchasing electric delivery vehicles and is investing in climate tech startups. Amazon’s carbon emissions, however, have increased every year since it began publicly sharing its carbon footprint, continually rising from 2019 to 2021.
A statement from Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser:
“We’ve already made significant progress on our path to decarbonizing our operations by 2040, and continue to prioritize investing and innovating in climate solutions across all areas of our business. That includes reaching 85% renewable energy across our entire operations, reducing excess packaging in our deliveries, and growing our transportation fleet with thousands of electric delivery vehicles all around the world—in fact, these vans were out on the road making Prime Day deliveries to customers in over 800 cities and regions across the U.S.”
