This week, Amazon launched Amazon Aware, a new Retail Brand (private brand) of sustainable, environmentally friendly products. Available in the United States, Canada, and Europe, Aware initially includes three categories of everyday essentials: beauty, apparel, and household goods. At launch, the brand includes a little more than 50 products with planned growth throughout 2022.

Amazon Aware is broken down into four main categories you can navigate — you can also filter by types of eco-friendly measures, including products made from recycled and organic materials.

• Apparel
• Beauty and skin care
• Bedding and bath
• Household essentials

“This is really about making progress over perfection and leveraging the best of Amazon,” Cyrus Wadia, Amazon’s head of sustainable product, told Joel Makower, Chairman & Co-founder of the GreenBiz Group recently. “It’s the best way for sustainability to get to scale in a way that hasn’t happened yet.”

The initiative began in 2020, not long after Wadia joined Amazon. When he joined the retailer, Wadia co-authored an internal document with a vision for a sustainability-focused brand. “But then our leadership said, ‘Let’s go bigger,’” said Wadia. “So it took on a life of its own.”

Aware was built on the foundation of Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly program, launched in 2020 and expanded last year, which highlights products that support the Climate Pledge, an initiative co-founded by Amazon that commits companies to achieve net-zero carbon by 2040.

“When you’re a customer, it’s super confusing,” said Wadia. “What is the sustainable option that you want to go after? Is it backed by science or is it more of a marketing claim? I think brands are all over the map on this. What we’re trying to do at Amazon is to bring a lot of rigor to this. There’s a direct feedback loop between what customers demand in the market or ask for. And all of a sudden, you get momentum — you start to learn about what the customer demand is really shaping up to be.”