Our objective with this story was to showcase one way Amazon is making concrete progress toward The Climate Pledge—our commitment to make all operations carbon neutral by 2040—while addressing a critical but often overlooked element in buildings. We aimed to reach general consumers and sustainability-focused audiences who might easily dismiss corporate environmental efforts as "greenwashing," so authenticity and substance were paramount.
The delivery station DII5 in Indiana became our example because it represents something larger than a single building: It's a live testing ground for market-ready sustainable technologies that could scale across Amazon's massive logistics network. With over 40 sustainability technologies and strategies embedded in its design, DII5 demonstrates how Amazon identifies, tests, and validates innovations before deploying them at scale—where they can make genuine environmental impact.
Our specific goals included showcasing real innovation rather than aspirational commitments, educating readers about emerging sustainable building technologies like mass timber, and demonstrating systematic thinking about sustainability challenges. We needed to make complex material science and building technology accessible without oversimplifying, and present Amazon's sustainability work with appropriate confidence while avoiding the hype and overclaiming that undermines credibility in this space. Ultimately, we wanted readers to finish the story understanding both what makes this building special and why it matters beyond this single facility—how it represents a scalable approach to reducing carbon emissions across Amazon's operations.
This four-month project featured a small, specialized team: one writer, one designer, one photo lead, and one illustrator. Our approach centered on making the building itself the story's visual and narrative centerpiece.
We began with research, interviewing sustainability experts and touring DII5. Seeing construction in progress helped us understand mass timber’s features and its application in a working logistics facility.
Our visual strategy embraced the building's striking appearance. Mass timber creates a dramatically different aesthetic than typical industrial construction, immediately signaling "something special" to readers. But we faced a storytelling challenge: DII5 features over 40 sustainability technologies. How could we highlight these innovations without overwhelming readers?
Our solution was visual cards appearing throughout the story, allowing readers to explore specific technologies without losing the main thread. The narrative leveraged the building's immediate visual impact, then built toward our central point: This facility is both a working delivery station and an experiment designed to identify which sustainable technologies can scale across Amazon's network for massive environmental impact.
Technical communication presented significant challenges. Mass timber involves specialized terminology—CLT, glue-lam, biogenic carbon—unfamiliar to general audiences. We avoided jargon wherever possible and clearly defined unavoidable technical terms, working closely with subject matter experts.
The trickiest part was tonal balance. Sustainability messaging risks sounding self-congratulatory, triggering skepticism about corporate greenwashing. Our first draft was intentionally enthusiastic, capturing all important elements. We then systematically toned it down, letting substantive work speak for itself through immersive photography and visual graphics, demonstrating Amazon's commitment rather than asserting it.
The results strongly validated our approach and met our objectives. Time on page roughly doubled compared to our typical stories, indicating readers were genuinely engaged rather than bouncing quickly. Even more encouraging, we attracted approximately twice our usual readership—particularly significant for a story designed to have long shelf life rather than being tied to a news cycle. These engagement metrics suggest we successfully navigated the sustainability messaging challenge: creating content compelling enough to attract skeptical audiences while substantive enough to hold their attention.
Our traffic metrics indicate the story continues resonating with readers discovering it long after publication. Four months later, the story is still attracting steady readership and high time-on-page numbers, with occasional spikes in interest. This further validates the investment we put into the story, fulfilling our goal of creating evergreen content that demonstrates ongoing commitment rather than a one-time announcement. The combination of strong quantitative performance and the story's longevity indicates we achieved our core objective: showing general consumers and sustainability-focused audiences that Amazon is doing real, substantive work toward The Climate Pledge rather than engaging in greenwashing. By making complex building technology accessible and letting DII5's innovations speak for themselves, we created a credible, engaging narrative about systematic sustainability efforts. Most importantly, the story established a replicable model for communicating about Amazon's environmental initiatives—demonstrating how to be authentic and substantive while remaining accessible and visually compelling, striking the delicate balance required for effective sustainability storytelling.
