Amazon India today announced that its fleet of delivery vehicles in the country will include 10,000 electric vehicles (EVs) by 2025. This partially fulfills the Climate Pledge signed by Amazon to include 100,000 EVs in the delivery fleet by 2030.
The EVs will operate in over 20 cities in India, including Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune, Nagpur, and Coimbatore. The fleet will include 3-wheeler and 4-wheeler vehicles designed and manufactured in India.
Amazon India has been working with several Indian OEMs to build a fleet of vehicles that would ensure environmental sustainability and would reduce their dependence on non-renewable sources. The further acceleration came from the GOI that set up the FAME 2 policy to encourage the adoption of EVs in India.
This pledge is among the various other pledges taken by Amazon to reduce its carbon footprint. In September 2019, Amazon announced its plan to eliminate single-use plastic by June 2020. According to Amazon’s climate pledge, the company will be net-zero carbon by 2040.
As a part of the pledge, Amazon announced that it is planning to introduce 10,000 EVs into its delivery fleet in 2022, globally, and 100,000 vehicles by 2030. The calculations show that by doing so Amazon can save up to 4 million metric tons of carbon per year by 2030.
Amazon India’s other sustainability initiatives
1. All plastic dunnage across the fulfillment network has been replaced with 100% recyclable paper cushions.
2. Single-use plastic used for packaging will be eliminated from the Fulfilment Centers by June 2020
3. All packaging material in the form of corrugated boxes and paper dunnage is biodegradable
4. To reduce packaging waste, Packaging Free Shipment (PFS) has now expanded to 14 cities within a year
5. 8 Fulfilment Centers and 2 Sortation centers are solar-powered and produced close to 10 Megawatt of solar energy in 2019 to run operations in the buildings