An e-comm giant moves towards sustainability

Online commerce brings great convenience. But many parts of this system are of huge concern environmentally. The data centres that take and process your orders are power guzzlers. All those delivery vehicles zipping by consume humongous amounts of fuel. And then there’s all that material that’s used to pack your orders, much of it involves plastic.

E-commerce companies are trying to deal with these concerns. Here we look at what one of the largest of them – Flipkart – is doing.

Rajneesh Kumar, senior vice-president and chief corporate affairs officer at Flipkart, says the company is rapidly moving towards electric vehicles (EVs) for its last-mile deliveries. As of end-2022, the delivery fleet had over 3,600 EVs – a 40% increase from 2021. “Today, even our outsourced delivery hubs function on a last-mile fleet that’s made up of 85% EV,” he says.

The grocery supply chain operates with more than 1,000 EVs across the country. In 2022, during the festive season, more than 2,000 electric two-wheelers handled over 1 lakh customer orders daily.

Renewable energy is also being increasingly used in several other areas. Nearly 60% of the company’s data centres are powered by renewable energy sources, mostly solar power. The company’s largest warehouse (or fulfilment centre as Flipkart calls it), at Haringhata in West Bengal, which was opened last year, has a 2.75mw solar rooftop photovoltaic plant that meets 100% day-time power requirement. The Haringhata warehouse has a Green Warehouse Platinum Certification from the Indian Green Building Council (IGBC) – said to be the first Platinum-certified warehouse for an e-commerce firm in India. It earned the Platinum rating with a score of 90 points – 75-100 points is the benchmark for this level of certification.

It was the result of a number of green features – a pond with a rainwater harvesting capacity of 8,000 cubic metres, 100% wastewater treatment and reuse for landscaping and flushing, more than 90% of construction waste diverted from landfills, over 25% reduction in water consumption through installation of water-efficient fixtures, biodiversity conservation.

As of July 2021, the company has eliminated 100% of single-use plastic from all its packaging. This has been made possible by replacing all erstwhile packaging material with various eco-friendly alternatives, including carton waste shredded material, eco-friendly paper shreds, and two-ply rolls.

The company has also developed a green packaging technique that helps optimise packaging material by understanding the product characteristics and making smart recommendations on the type of packaging material to be used. This technique also helps choose the right box size, thereby further cutting down on wastage of packaging material.

“Our technology-centric approach plays a vital role in supporting Flipkart’s commitment to sustainability,” says Jeyandran Venugopal, the chief product and technology officer.

The effort towards sustainability actually starts right from the time a customer uses the app on his or her smartphone. The Flipkart mobile app has been customised to perform at a level that consumes a minimal amount of the phone’s resources – by introducing innovations such as prefetching the ‘next’ pages upfront so that users do not have to wait for too long, use of best-in-class media compressions to reduce the size of images and videos, without compromising on quality and efficient data caching. The introduction of digital/paperless invoicing has helped save humongous amounts of paper.

Hemant Badri, the senior vice-president and head of supply chain, customer experience and recommerce, says that by leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning, the company is able to optimise delivery routes, detect errors and reduce resource wastage. The Haringhata warehouse is an example of how AI and ML are being utilised to ensure automated storage and retrieval systems, robotic packaging arms, cross-belt sorters and a 9km-long network conveyor belt, all of which help to reduce the turnaround time of shipments by 35%-50% and thereby conserve energy.

In December 2022, Flipkart became the first Indian ecommerce company to commit to sourcing 100% of its electricity needs from renewable energy by 2030. As a part of this pledge, it took the Climate Group’s RE100 commitment, becoming a member of this collaboration of influential businesses committed to 100 per cent renewable electricity. The company has also committed to eliminate carbon emissions by 2030.


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