To celebrate Earth Month, Amazon spotlighted three employees working on decarbonization projects across different sectors of the business. Kayla Fenton leads a team that’s using artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver orders with less packaging; Ofei Mante is developing a way to incorporate carbon capture into the process of making packaging materials; and Jamey Mulligan leads a team that is working to restore tropical rainforests to mitigate climate devastation. Read on to learn more about their stories.

A key part of Amazon’s goal to become a more sustainable company is to reduce packaging waste. But choosing packaging that’s efficient while also protecting the product can be challenging. That’s where Kayla Fenton and her team come in. Fenton, who is senior manager of technology products with Amazon’s Packaging Innovation team, started out as an intern with Amazon seven years ago. Even then, she was brainstorming ideas to reduce and avoid waste in the business’s operations. 

Since Fenton got her start, she’s contributed to myriad solutions for how to reduce waste, including the Ships in Product Packaging program, which allows Amazon to ship products that are already in robust manufacturer packaging, eliminating the experience of customers opening a box within a box. 

Hear Fenton talk more about the program here:

Fenton and team’s latest innovation is the Package Decision Engine, which uses AI to determine the most efficient packaging for items that need to be shipped, reducing the use of cardboard boxes, air pillows, tape, and mailers. “I have a one-and-a-half-year-old, so more deliveries with more packaging is a pain point that I do not want in my life,” Fenton said. 

Scientists at Amazon trained the AI model by showing it millions of examples of products that were delivered without damage in various types of packaging. They also showed the model products that arrived damaged, along with the keywords and packaging types used in each circumstance. The model learned from there. For instance, it learned that a padded mailer with limited cushioning likely won’t protect an item with the words “grocery,” “screen,” or “stoneware” in the description, so it now recommends a sturdier option like a box. 

The model has worked so well that the team is now training it for development worldwide.

As a senior research scientist on the Amazon Worldwide Sustainability team, Ofei Mante gets to apply his extensive experience as a research scientist and see his innovations come to life in the real world. “The most critical aspect of my job is to look deep into the future [and] identify technologies that are emerging to reduce the carbon footprint of materials that we use at Amazon,” Mante said. 

He and his team’s latest innovation? Finding a new way to capture and store carbon within the Amazon supply chain. “We realized that capturing emissions associated with making paper for [the Amazon] box can have a significant impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. 

The paper that’s used to make a classic Amazon box uses a lot of energy and burns a lot of fuel. This generates large amounts of carbon dioxide. But Mante and his team innovated a solution in which the emitted carbon dioxide comes into contact with a liquid that binds to the CO2, which can then be separated and transported for permanent storage underground. 

Amazon is currently applying this technology to design a first-of-its-kind carbon capture and storage paper mill plant that, once completed, will enable the annual production of 100,000 metric tons of decarbonized paper. 

“My goal is to leave a world where my children have a life of clean air, quality water, and having minimal impact on the climate that we all live in,” Mante said. 

Learn more about Mante and his team’s innovation here: 

The Brazilian state of Pará is twice the size of France and home to a large section of the Amazon rainforest. It also accounts for 10–13 percent of global deforestation. Jamey Mulligan, head of carbon neutralization science and strategy at Amazon, leads a team that’s trying to change that.

Mulligan and his team are developing a technical strategy to solve neutralization problems, including scaling finance to reduce tropical deforestation, restore lost forest, and advance technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere. The team is doing this through partnerships with leading industries, startups, and governments like the one in Pará.

Learn more about Mulligan and the work his small team does here:

In Pará, the government now plans to take the land that’s been illegally cleared and designate it specifically for the purposes of restoration. Deforestation rates are down by about half in Brazil due to the state’s restoration efforts in recent years, thanks in part to the work of Mulligan and his team. “We’re making big bets where we really think we can break through,” he said.

Prior to joining Amazon, Mulligan served in the Obama administration, where he worked with the Environmental Protection Agency on resourcing and regulations related to climate change and air quality. “Being in the White House, everyone expected that the real action on climate policy was going to happen in the halls of government,” Mulligan said. “Government policy remains critical, but the private sector needs to act as well. Amazon co-founding The Climate Pledge was one of those watershed moments where you have the private sector acting more decisively and more confidently when it comes to progress on climate change.”