Episode 28: Everything You Need to Know About the Amazon Climate Pledge Friendly Program with Giselle Gonzales from Amazon
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Climate Pledge Friendly helps consumers discover and shop for more sustainable products on Amazon. In this episode, Tad and Julianna sit down with Giselle Gonzales, a Sr. Program Manager on Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly (CPF) team, to discuss the Amazon CPF Program and how it started, how consumers can find CPF products while shopping on Amazon, the significance of the CPF badge on buying behavior, how third-party certifiers are selected for the CPF program, and Amazon’s own corporate sustainability initiatives. We also answer an audience question at the end of the episode about why a company would want to create an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD).
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Can you tell us a little bit more about the Amazon Climate Pledge Friendly program and how it started?
“Climate Pledge Friendly is a program that helps customers discover and shop for more sustainable products. We launched back in 2020 and just within the first two years, we are now live in the US and five countries in Europe (Germany, the UK, Italy, France, and Spain). I think by the end of the year we're going to be recognizing over 50 certifications from trusted third-party certifiers around the world and are recognizing over 300,000 products across 20,000+ brands. What we aim to do as a program is normalize sustainable shopping. When I log on, I'm very eco-conscious about what I buy, but when my mom logs on who may not really care too much about sustainability certifications or even know what they are, I want her to be able to know that she can easily find a more sustainable alternative.
Climate Pledge Friendly is trying to make more sustainable products accessible, not only to those who are eco-conscious of the bunch, but also those who are price conscious and who might not even be aware of how their purchases are impacting the world around them. Our director of Product Sustainability has this phrase where he says, “It's not meaningful unless it's accessible.” I think Climate Pledge Friendly is really trying to make these products more accessible so that customers who are educated can make those educated decisions far easier and those who aren't can solely ease their way without a huge price or time commitment that they have to bear to find a better alternative for their families and the planet.”
How can our listeners find climate pledge friendly products on amazon?
“If you were to go on Amazon today on your phone or the web, let's say you search for something like laundry detergent, you will see more sustainable products available highlighted with a little Climate Pledge Friendly badge. It will show up as a little widget. You can find this within the search tool. You can find this as a filter on the side. You can find it on the detail pages. Let's say you're looking up laundry detergent and you filter for just Climate Pledge Friendly options. You're going to see that widget for any product that holds one or more third-party certifications. With laundry detergents specifically, you might see Safer Choice, which would recognize products that contain safer ingredients for human health or the environment or you might see Compact by Design, which highlights products that basically reduce excess air and water, which then reduces the carbon footprint.
All across the shopping journey, we're highlighting ways to find these more sustainable products. I think we currently have over 18 discoverability features now to make this easier for customers to find. Even when they're on a shopping detail page for a non-sustainable product, they might see “consider a similar item” right under the purchase button where they can see, “Hey, this product might not be certified. But how about this alternative? It's equivalent in price to the same type of product, but this one we have a third-party justification that it's a more sustainable option.”
Are customers selecting products because of the Climate Pledge Friendly badge?
“This is when things get really exciting. I have conversations like this with other people like me who are just on Amazon as a consumer, but then also with brands and certifiers to see that there truly is a business impact for not only creating more sustainable products, but recognizing those through not just your own voice shouting into the void saying, “I'm more sustainable,” but having a trusted third-party that will validate any of those claims. We are seeing customers respond in really exciting ways. We are actually seeing that products with the Climate Pledge Friendly badge have on average 10% higher product page views than products without the Climate Pledge Friendly badge. This is really important, because I think it shows that Climate Pledge Friendly is driving real switching behavior from non-sustainable to more sustainable products. This is not just a couple of one-offs. This is to the tune of millions of customers that have switched to more sustainable products across categories.
Another thing we're also seeing that is really exciting is we have the consumer side of the business, but we also have Amazon Business, which targets purchasing for B2B customers. That side of Amazon Business has rolled out some really interesting and robust tools to help businesses buy more sustainable products including some buying policies that they have.
They have a Climate Pledge Friendly buying policy that can be used by business account administrators to enable them to buy Climate Pledge Friendly products or have them be prioritized when considering what they're going to be buying in bulk. We have been really excited to see that Climate Pledge Friendly is the most adopted, socially responsible purchasing policy for Amazon business among our B2B customers. One last data point is if we look back on 2021 as a whole, we shipped over 370 million Climate Pledge Friendly products, and I can't even imagine what it's going to be by the end of this year because we've continued to see growth. I think just the bottom line to drive home is that there is such a significant business case for making more sustainable products and substantiating those improvements with third-party certifications because customers are clearly responding.”
GreenCircle Certified has recently been included in the Amazon Climate Pledge Friendly program. Can you tell us how you go through the process of selecting the third-party certifiers for Amazon Climate Pledge Friendly?
“It is a multi-month, sometimes even multi-year process with many stakeholders. I have the honor and the burden of making sure that we are onboarding the best possible certifications into Climate Pledge Friendly. We have a lot of stakeholders internally and externally with external consultants that help essentially review every potential certification. We get new certifications requested from our customers, from certifications themselves, from government agencies, even just internal employees who love what a certification is doing and want us to amplify their mission. From there we go through internal reviews. We have an entire product sustainability team that supports us to look at every element of the sustainability story and criteria that a certification holds. We have a third-party that validates every one of those steps as well. We really just want to make sure that we are not just meeting what's average in the industry. We want to be holding brands and these certifications to an even higher bar. It's a pretty time intensive process, but once a certification is in, we have so much confidence that these are brands that we ourselves would trust and that our customers would trust as well.
That's excellent. I know that as a company it's great to hear that you go through a very rigorous process to make sure you are picking legitimate certification bodies and we appreciate that. I will say going through the process with you all definitely took some time and it was great. We had to provide a lot of information and background about our certifications and who else recognized this. It was great to see that you were doing that level of scrutiny, because it's really important that people can trust the certifications and also know that you're going through that level of analysis to make sure you're getting the best possible companies to do that. So, it’s great to hear that.”
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ABOUT Giselle Gonzales
Giselle Gonzales is a Sr. Program Manager on Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly (CPF) team, where she leads strategic engagement with global brands and certifiers to support more sustainable product development. At Amazon she has also managed the selection, onboarding, and launches of CPF’s 3rd party certifications in order to make it easier for customers to find and choose more sustainable products. She came to the CPF program from AWS Startups after working with social and environmental impact-focused startups and working in travel industry with National Geographic and Disney. She has a Masters from the University of Edinburgh Business School and is passionate about merging profit and purpose to drive positive change—especially at Amazon’s scale.
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