Environmental Protection We are committed to sourcing products and services that do not cause unnecessary environmental harm, and work with industry experts on ways to understand the environmental impact of our products. We are a member of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, an industrywide group of leading apparel and footwear brands, retailers, manufacturers, NGOs, academic experts, and government organizations working to reduce the environmental and social impacts of apparel products around the world. We encourage our Amazon-branded suppliers to evaluate their practices using the Coalition’s Higg Index, a tool to help manufacturers measure the social and environmental performance of their facilities. We are committed to driving adoption of this assessment and helping our suppliers understand their environmental impacts. Our aim is to work with industry partners and our suppliers to understand their environmental footprints and set goals to reduce environmental impacts. Access to Effective Grievance Mechanisms We are building our efforts to provide people connected to our value chain with access to effective grievance mechanisms as part of our supply chain due diligence and investments in worker well-being, and have added this as a key commitment area. We help our suppliers work with a number of global partners to provide supply chain workers with access to effective grievance mechanisms, including the Amader Kotha Helpline in Bangladesh; Ulula in China, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, and the UK; the amfori SPEAK FOR CHANGE Programme in Vietnam; the Responsible Labor Initiative’s Suara Kami helpline in Malaysia; and Sedex Direct Worker Reporting in India. These organizations are key to helping our suppliers listen to their workers and raise awareness of issues in our supply chain. We provide our suppliers and service providers with these tools in order to help them hear directly from workers about their experiences, and to support the resolution of issues from the workers’ perspectives. Across these mechanisms used in 2021, 92% of closed issues have had worker verification of remedial actions. As an example of our work in this area, we enrolled our Bangladeshi suppliers in Amader Kotha, a helpline that provides workers in the ready-made garment sector a safe and effective way to report and resolve workplace issues. We provide ongoing capacity-building to suppliers enrolled in Amader Kotha, assisting with grievance handling mechanisms and worker voice tools. In our third year of working with Amader Kotha, we are seeing significant impact. More than 88% of workers employed with our Bangladeshi suppliers reported that they were satisfied with the usage of the Amader Kotha Helpline. In 2021, workers placed 530 calls to the helpline—86% related to labor issues and 4.6% related to safety issues. These cases are resolved directly in partnership with factory management in line with the helpline’s protocols. Commodities and Traceability Assessing and Mapping Risk Commodity supply chains are complicated and fragmented, and improved visibility into raw material supply chains better enables businesses to identify human rights and labor rights violations and hold suppliers accountable. In 2021, we completed our first commodity and materiality risk assessment for Amazon-branded products and identified eight commodities with salient social and environmental risks as a key milestone in the development of our responsible commodity sourcing roadmap. Focus on Cotton In 2021, we continued to strengthen our efforts to address human rights risks in global cotton supply chains. Amazon joined Better Cotton’s Retailer and Brand Advisory Panel on Traceability to help steer Better Cotton’s initial vision and strategy toward achieving more traceable cotton in the coming years. We also participated in the Responsible Sourcing Network’s initiative YESS: Yarn Ethically & Sustainably Sourced. YESS works to address forced labor in the cotton value chain by providing training to, and managing the assessment of, spinners and fabric mills to identify and address forced labor in cotton production. Focus on Minerals In 2021, we increased our support for industry collaboration toward responsible mineral sourcing. We remain members of the Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade and the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI). We also enhanced our cobalt due diligence program using the RMI’s cobalt reporting template. We supported RMI’s Smelter Audit Fund to increase assessments for tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold smelters. These assessments are critical to responsible mineral sourcing in our supply chains. In 2022, we will implement additional smelter due diligence protocols as we work toward 100% of tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold mineral smelters and refiners in our supply chain being certified using a recognized minerals assurance program. Purchasing Practices Supplier feedback on our purchasing practices is important in understanding how we can improve supplier relationships and understanding our potential impact on human rights in our supply chain. In 2021, Amazon partnered with the Better Buying Institute to capture anonymous supplier feedback on our purchasing practices through an annual survey. Benchmarked against industry peers, we identified key areas, including planning and forecasting, supplier engagement, and on-time payments, where we can improve practices to drive a better supplier experience of working with Amazon. In 2021, Amazon partnered with Better Buying and other brands to create an e-learning course to raise awareness about the importance of the issue. We are proud to have been part of the effort to end state-imposed forced labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton sector. In 2019, Amazon signed the Cotton Campaign’s Uzbek Cotton Pledge with over 300 brands and retailers to raise awareness and oppose the systemic use of forced labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton production. As of March 2022, the International Labour Organization has independently verified that the government of Uzbekistan has ended the practice of state-imposed forced labor in its cotton sector and the Cotton Campaign has lifted the Uzbek Cotton Pledge, ending the boycott of Uzbek cotton. Learn more about our spotlight on worker voice . 2021 Sustainability Report Introduction I Environment I Society I Governance I Appendix 67