Amazon's George Bandy on leadership and legacy

The concept of legacy is particularly apt to describe the work of advancing the circular economy. First, we must consider the legacy of our products and processes: Where do our materials come from? Where are they going next? What impact will they leave in their wake? We must also account for legacy carbon emissions and regenerate living systems. Finally, we must confront the legacy that companies and organizations are leaving during this decisive decade for climate action.  

A few weeks ago at Circularity 21, I had the pleasure of interviewing Amazon’s new head of worldwide circular economy, George Bandy Jr., a man who values his personal legacy, deeply honors his lineage of family and mentors such as Interface’s legendary Ray Anderson, and has worked as a sustainability leader for decades. We discussed his new leadership role to establish and implement Amazon’s circular economy strategy, as well as the legacy he personally seeks to leave in the field and the world. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Lauren Phipps: You joined the Amazon team just five months ago. What do you actually do as the worldwide head of circular economy? 

George Bandy Jr.: Right now, I’m using a lot of my effort to develop relationships with the people who are there doing amazing work. Sometimes within the scope of corporate America, we lose sight of the human aspect of circularity and sustainability. We get so focused on our individual goals. I’m spending a lot of time developing relationships, listening to foundational concepts and ideas, developing metrics to think about things strategically. 

I’m going in with confident humility that we’re going to be able to make some adjustments as we move forward. 

Phipps: How’s it going so far? 

Bandy: To whom much is given, much is required. The expectations for Amazon are great, and I think that we have accepted that challenge as an organization. Over the next year, people are going to see an increase in how we communicate to our customers — we have a customer obsession that’s critical. 

We have some programs that you may not already know about. Amazon Second Chance is the online resource that we have where our customers can learn about prepaid postal returns around collection services. Amazon invented a machine learning algorithm to begin to create the smartest packaging choice for our customers to rightsize that packaging material and reduce the weight of outbound packaging by 36 percent. That eliminated about 1 million tons of packaging material, equivalent to about 2 billion shipping boxes. They’ve eliminated 27 million plastic bags from our device packaging in 2020 alone. 

Our goal is to make Amazon device packaging 100 percent curbside recyclable by 2023. By doing that we also have to invest in organizations like The Recycling Partnerships that support communities and local governments in education and infrastructure. We invested over $10 million with the Closed Loop Infrastructure Fund to finance recycling infrastructure in the U.S. Amazon aims to increase product and packaging recycling, ensuring that materials get back into the manufacturing supply chain. 

It’s a collaborative partnership. We’ve got to help our customers be able to get the materials back to us. We’ve got to begin to develop circular economy models that allow the communities to also be able to benefit from creating ways to refurbish and use the materials in a different way, and then [get] those raw materials back so we can use them in a different way. [We’re] looking at our material flows as they come to our organization and making some investments in the appropriate ways and looking for ways for us internally to do some great work.

Phipps: How does Amazon’s focus on climate change and commitment to becoming net zero by 2040 align with your circular economy work? Are they connected or separate workstreams?

Bandy: The word I would use is concomitant. They are directly connected. There’s a tie that’s going to be critical to our success and that’s minimizing waste, increasing recycling and providing options to our customers to reuse, repair and recycle their products appropriately. Sending less material to the landfill and more back into the circular economy is ultimately going to lower our carbon footprint.

Phipps: How do you think this concept of circularity has changed over the last 10 or 20 years?

Bandy: It’s gotten important quick. The vision for where we’re going is becoming more encompassing. Before it was very linear in the way that we even thought about sustainability: Everybody had their specific area of expertise. What circular economy does is it builds bridges between the things that we had not thought about in terms of their connectivity in a different way.

Digging too deep into one thing can make you miss the connectivity to how it impacts others is where we make a lot of mistakes. I think that circular economy gives us a more robust view of how things connect with each other across multiple aspects of the sustainability spectrum.

Phipps: You recently gave the commencement speech at Alabama State University and something that you talked about was having the courage and genius of a vision, which I thought was so beautiful. Can you talk about what gives you so much courage?

Bandy: My father left a legacy. He was a House of Representatives [member] and also a minister, and one of the things that he taught me growing up is having responsibility for generations that you haven’t seen. It was very difficult for me to understand when I was young as to what he meant by that, but the older I’ve gotten, the more I began to think about how I create what’s called a living legacy. How do you live in a way so that people are able to see courage and genius in you? 

I think that one of the things that sometimes gets lost along this sustainability journey is that we’re human and we’re going to make some mistakes. But if you make mistakes trying to do the right thing, I think that people will give you a little bit of grace in terms of how you’re able to move the needle. 

You can watch my full interview with George Bandy Jr. here.