human
Amazon is ruining the environment with their packing and deliveries. The government should put limits on them.
assistant
Well, that is one way to look at it. There are two big ways that Amazon is very energy intensive. The first is the sheer volume of packages they deliver. They have around 120 billion packages delivered a year, which is by far the most of any company. Even if you look only at the number of packages delivered by just one individual company, Amazon has 27 billion more packages delivered per year than the second largest company, Staples. The second big thing is that Amazon pays much lower rates to ship these packages, which gives them an advantage over small businesses that have to pay much higher rates. Even after taking these two facts into account, though, they are still not the biggest environmental culprit among the large retailers. The largest single contributor to climate change in the retail sector is Costco. The interesting thing is that this is because of Costco’s energy efficient HVAC systems, not because of their deliveries. Now, it’s hard to attribute climate change to any one company, so it would be hard to determine who is “ruining the environment”, but if you look at how Costco measures up to Amazon, it’s Costco who is the environmental villain.