Amazon is known for its shameless tax avoidance, workers’ rights abuses, environmental impacts and much more. The company has been the subject of an Ethical Consumer global boycott call since 2012.
We’ve summarised the key ethical issues to consider when it comes to Amazon.
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Our research highlights many ethical issues for Amazon, including: tax conduct, company ethos, workers' rights, tech sustainability, climate change, conflict minerals, agriculture, palm oil sourcing, packaging, and animal products. The company scored 40 points or less in each of these categories.
Below we outline some of these issues. To see the full detailed stories, and Amazon's overall ethical rating, please sign in or subscribe.
We launched a boycott of Amazon in 2012 over its tax avoidance. This was called because in 2011, as the world's biggest online retailer, Amazon generated UK sales of £2.9bn yet paid only £1.8m in corporation tax. The correct figure should have been over £8 million at the full rate of corporation tax at that time.
Things have become much worse since then.
In 2024, Amazon's UK revenue surged to reach a massive £29 billion. This is 10 times its turnover when Ethical Consumer’s boycott campaign started. Yet, the company continues to underpay its taxes and withhold details of its actual profits. While it proudly states that it paid just over £1 billion in direct taxes that year, it remains unclear what level of profit those tax payments were based on.
Paul Monaghan, chief executive of Ethical Consumer's sister organisation, the Fair Tax Foundation said: “Amazon are once again tactically releasing their total tax contribution calculation to distract attention away from the pitifully low levels of corporation tax that have been contributed by Amazon UK Services over recent years. The public are not interested in how much VAT Amazon has collected and passed on to the Government. They want to know how much profit they actually account for in the UK from the £29billion of revenue they collect here. One can only surmise that the lack of transparency is connected to the sizeable chunk of UK revenue that is still shunted to the historically ‘loss-making’ subsidiary in Luxembourg."
The latest research by Ethical Consumer calculated that over half a billion pounds (£575,000,000) could have been lost to the UK public purse in 2024 alone, just from the corporation tax avoidance of Amazon.
To make matters even worse, it was reported in June 2023 that Amazon received a tax credit of £7.7m. This means that in 2022, Amazon’s main UK division not only avoided paying taxes, it took from the pot that tax-payers filled.
Amazon lost points for excessive executive remuneration as well. Andrew R Jassy, the president and CEO, received USD 40.1 (£29.8) million in 2024. Five other executives earned over $20 million each (lowest $25m (£18.5m), highest $34m (£25m)).
An average Amazon warehouse worker’s starting salary in the UK is under £14 an hour.
Amazon also recently got involved in nuclear power. It announced in October 2024 that it was investing half a billion pounds to build a small modular nuclear reactor to fulfil the growing energy needs of its data centres run by its subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Earlier this year, together with Google and Meta, Amazon signed a pledge to support efforts to at least triple nuclear energy worldwide by 2050.
It also lost points for membership of various lobby groups such as the World Economic Forum, Eurocommerce or the Business Roundtable. These organisations tend to exert undue corporate influence on policy-makers in favour of market solutions that are potentially detrimental to the environment and human rights.
Amazon.com, through Amazon Web Services (AWS) signed a $1.22 billion contract with the Israeli state in 2021, alongside Google. Known as Project Nimbus, it promised vast cloud storage, artificial intelligence tools, and analytics to “the Government, the Security Services and other entities.”
Nimbus provides the backbone for Israel’s apartheid regime and its war on Gaza. Despite Amazon’s claims to publicly characterise Nimbus as a civilian project, Israeli officials themselves have credited the project with giving the military new capabilities during airstrikes.
We have a separate article on Amazon's links with Israel.
Amazon is renowned for its poor treatment of its workers.
The Centre for Law and Work together with Berkeley University of California published a document in 2022 pointing out that in spite of all Amazon’s claims, “it absolutely does not” comply with international labour standards.
On many occasions Amazon has aggressively opposed unionisation and organising efforts at its warehouses.
In April 2024, GMB filed legal proceedings against Amazon. The union claims Amazon has engaged in widespread attempts to coerce staff to cancel their trade union membership. Union recognition would mean Amazon would be forced to sit down with GMB on matters relating to pay, hours, and holidays.
Amazon has reportedly spent tens of millions on anti-union consultants in the past years.
Amazon suppliers don’t receive better treatment either from the company. Amazon was listed in the UK’s Groceries Code Adjudicator (GCA) survey for the first time in 2023.
Since then it has been named as the worst food retailer every year.
The GCA is responsible for encouraging, monitoring and enforcing compliance with the Code and thus for regulating the relationships between the UK's largest grocery retailers and their direct suppliers. Perhaps unsurprisingly Amazon jumped straight to the last place of the list with almost four times as many accusations of code violations as the next company up.
Amazon sources conflict minerals and cotton without adequately stringent policies for protecting human rights. This is a concern because these products are at risk of being sourced from places where human rights abuses occur, including Turkmenistan (in the cotton sector) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (conflict minerals). Much more is needed than vague commitments to ensure the supply chain is free from violations.
In June 2023 Amazon agreed to pay $25 million in fines to settle alleged privacy violations. These involved its voice assistant Alexa and doorbell camera Ring. US’s Federal Trade Commission claims in one lawsuit that the tech company kept recordings of children's conversations with its voice assistant Alexa but failed to delete them – as it had promised it would – when parents asked it to do so.
Amazon agreed to pay another $5.8 million, because Ring had allowed employees and contractors to watch recordings of customers' private spaces, sometimes including bedrooms and bathrooms.
Amazon reports on its greenhouse gas emissions but it uses loopholes to make it look to be in a better shape than it really is.
Its scope 2 emissions are, for example, reported using the market based method which makes the figures smaller than they actually are. The trend in those emissions is worrying, says the Guardian which calculated that Amazon’s actual scope 2 emissions are 1.2 times higher than that claimed by the company.
Its scope 3 emissions – originating from its supply chain, usually the largest for most organisations – also aren’t comprehensive. An article with the poignant title: “Private Report Shows How Amazon Drastically Undercounts Its Carbon Footprint” highlights how Amazon vastly understates its emissions by taking responsibility for the full climate impact only of products with an Amazon brand label.
According to Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an organisation of Amazon corporate workers who care about climate justice, Amazon branded products account for as little as 1% of all goods and services. This suggests that Amazon’s scope 3 emissions could be 100 times higher than claimed by the company.
Alberto Carrillo Pineda, managing director of the Science Based Targets initiative said "Under the [Greenhouse Gas] protocol, retail companies should be counting all the products they sell directly to consumers”. The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) is a corporate climate action organisation that enables companies and financial institutions worldwide to play their part in combating the climate crisis.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s market leading cloud computing arm, currently owns about a third of the entire cloud market. In 2018, WikiLeaks disclosed the locations of more than 100 AWS data centres around the world. Over fifty were in the US and several in known tax havens, such as Luxembourg, Singapore and most famously, Ireland. .
Data centres account for about one fourth of all electricity use in Ireland and it is predicted to increase to over a quarter by 2028.
The high level of electricity required to power data centres makes them a huge risk to achieving the rapid, just energy transition to a fossil free future that we urgently need, claims the organisation Not Here Not Anywhere (NHNA). One of its core aims is to stop the development of new fossil fuel infrastructure and says that although renewable electricity generation is on the rise, data centres expansion may outpace this.
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice recently says that in spite of the company claiming that its operations are run entirely on renewable sources of power, in truth just 22 percent of power used by the company's data centres is from renewables.
Amazon has no policy for genetically modified organisms, the use of pesticides, or agricultural run-off. It stated in its 2022 Sustainability report that it aims to reduce its agricultural impact but it largely discussed funding relevant projects as opposed to addressing its own impacts.
Amazon does address reducing water use in its supply chain. It has an active stewardship programme in its operations in India and it achieved a Water Neutrality Index (WNI) of 1. The WNI defines “water neutral” as the amount of water conserved being equal to the quantity of water consumed, with a score of 1.
The mass production of palm oil relies on the destruction of rainforests. This has wide ranging impacts including contributing to climate change, as well as loss of biodiversity and human rights.
Some of Amazon’s products come from a physically certified supply chain but less than 50% does, meaning that half of its palm is untraceable and could potentially be connected to abuses of rainforests and people.
As a company that relies on packaging, it has no evidence of plans to reduce packaging in its supply chain or the packaging of its products. Excessive packaging leads to wasted resources like paper and oil (to make plastic), as well as environmental impacts when it is thrown away.
Recycling company Business Waste has called out the company and suggested that it takes cardboard boxes back from customers to increase recycling rates. In the UK a third of all the cardboard may end up in landfill. Business Waste believes that Amazon needs to take some responsibility for its packaging.
It has, though, reduced per-shipment packaging weight by 41% on average since 2015. Analysts however, believe that Amazon delivers more than 10 million customer packages every day.
Amazon owns various tech products such as its Kindle, Amazon Echo Dot or its Fire tablets but scores badly when it comes to tech sustainability.
The repairability and warranty on its tech devices are all at the lower end of the scale. It does, however, use a fair amount of recycled materials in the devices. It says that some of its products are made from majority- or all-recycled content. Some for example contain 75% recycled plastic,100% recycled aluminium, and 90% recycled magnesium. It also claims to have incorporated 50% recycled plastic into certain power adapters that ship with its devices.
Amazon has an all round inadequate animal welfare policy.
It has no policy on animal testing, sells products made of factory farmed animals and sells live animals, such as lobsters on its website. Fur coats made of racoons, rabbits and chinchillas are also for sale on its website.
It was criticised by PETA in 2023 for its “continued sale of Thai coconut milk even after learning of PETA Asia’s investigations revealing that monkeys are forced to pick coconuts in Thailand and are trained through fear of punishment, caged in isolation, and chained for life”.
It prohibits listings relating to endangered species, but only in line with the law, so it’s really doing the bare minimum when it comes to the wellbeing of other species.
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More information on all these topics is on our Boycott Amazon page.
The text above was written in September 2025, and was based on research mainly conducted in August 2024 and August 2025.
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