Amazon is expanding its “Climate Pledge Friendly” to Belgium and Sweden, making it easier for customers to filter searches to highlight products with sustainable features.
Helping to choose sustainably
The new label, in the form of a green leaf, will highlight products with at least one sustainable feature, adding a link to the sustainability features. On the Belgian webshop, they will also listed together in a separate shop, as is the case for local products in the “Brands of Belgium” selection.
“This was one of my priorities for 2024”, says country manager Eva Faict of Amazon Belgium told RetailDetail in an interview. “Seven in ten Belgian consumers would like to shop more sustainably, but 56 % cannot find them, or can not see easily which products are more sustainable than others.” A survey conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Amazon among 1,000 Belgian consumers showed that only 11 % always understand the environmental impact of a product while shopping online. More than half (55 %) of those surveyed therefore want retailers to help them make more sustainable choices on everyday products.
70.000 products
Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly programme selects products made with recycled and biodegradable materials, for example, or those that are more energy efficient than comparable items, based on 41 verified and recognised third-party certifications, such as Rainforest Alliance, Fair for Life and Forest Stewardship Council. Globally, it involves 1.4 million products, a selection that more than doubled last year. The Belgian online shop starts out with 70,000 products, but “we are going to expand that number quickly”, Faict says.
Amazon launched the Climate Pledge in 2019, to bring together companies from countries around the world with the commitment to become “net zero” by 2040, ten years earlier than required by the Paris Climate Agreement. The retailer is also committed to sustainability locally: “In Antwerp, nine out of ten parcels are delivered by electric vehicles, in Brussels we use cargo bikes, we use 100 % renewable energy”, Faict points out. “Our philosophy is that we have to take responsibility, with the large scale we have, and that we can bring other parties along with us in this.”
