"Alexa, grow a tree!" That is what US residents with an Alexa smart speaker will now be able to ask of their voice assistant. They will then be able to track the number of trees planted in real time from their Amazon Pay account. But what impact can this new feature really have?
Of all the environmentally friendly actions that can be carried out in a few clicks from the comfort of your couch, planting trees is without a doubt one of the most widespread. Each search query entered into the German search engine Ecosia or the French browser extension Refoorest, for example, promises that a tree will be planted.
It's a simple trick that appeals to internet users and that has evidently not escaped the attention of multinationals like Amazon, which has just announced a new initiative through its voice assistant, Alexa. People who wish to do so will be able to donate a dollar (taken directly from their Amazon Pay account) to plant a tree by saying the magic phrase -- "Alexa, grow a tree! -- in a loud and clear voice.
To launch this initiative, Amazon has partnered with the NGO One Tree Planted, to which the firm says it is donating $1 million. The money is expected to fund four different projects in the United States and India, and aims (among other things) to reforest land that has been razed for mining, logging and agriculture. The goal is to plant one million trees between April and December 2022.
Genuine commitment or greenwashing?
It's a great project on paper, but one that's not without questions, especially when a GAFAM big tech firm is behind it. "Amazon destroys products returned by customers when it is cheaper to do so. Therefore, selling sustainable products while persisting with these practices poses a problem. You can do what you want in parallel, but as long as you're destroying new [products], the impact of that action will be reduced," commented Frederic Bordage, founder of the GreenIT collective, interviewed by ETX Daily Up in November 2020 following the announcement of Amazon's "Climate Pledge Friendly" program. Note that the American platform ships between four and five billion packages per year worldwide.
However, planting trees to restore areas devastated by deforestation (itself caused by human activity) is not always enough, as scientific research has shown. Several NGOs also warn against the seductive but misleading promise of "carbon offsetting" as a way to achieve carbon neutrality (a goal brandished by Amazon and other big tech firms), in other words respecting the balance between emissions and carbon storage, thanks to the planting of trees.
Some NGOs are more skeptical about the intentions of multinationals that embark on this type of project. Greenpeace went as far as to call out carbon offsets as a "scam" in 2021, describing the system as "a bookkeeping trick intended to obscure climate wrecking-emissions. It's tree planting window dressing aimed at distracting from ecosystem destruction."
