Dive Brief:
- E-commerce platform eBay debuted its first climate transition plan on Wednesday, outlining the company’s strategy to reach net-zero emissions across its supply chain by 2045.
- The strategy includes continued decarbonization of eBay’s operations and a major focus on cutting emissions across the company’s downstream transportation and distribution, as well as strategies to decarbonize the rest of its value chain and neutralize remaining emissions.
- Like most companies, scope 3 emissions make up the bulk of eBay’s carbon footprint, while scope 1 and 2 emissions made up just 0.2% of its total emissions in 2024. The company is targeting for a large portion of the anticipated decarbonization to come from collaboration with carriers across the supply chain, according to the transition plan.
Dive Insight:
The climate transition plan comes nearly a year after eBay announced climate targets for its entire value chain. The e-commerce company set targets in 2021 to reduce its scope 1 and scope 2 emissions 90% by 2030 and reduce its downstream transportation and distribution emissions by 20% within that same timeframe, compared to 2019 baselines. Both targets have been validated by the Science Based Targets initiative.
eBay expanded its goals to include a net-zero target and additional scope 3 targets in 2025, and SBTi validated the expanded goals. Its net-zero ambitions include goals to cut downstream transportation and distribution emissions by 27.5% by 2030 and reduce its absolute scope 3 emissions 90% by 2045 and maintain at least a 90% scope 1 and 2 emissions reduction by 2045, all compared to 2019 baselines.
“eBay’s Climate Transition Plan is a comprehensive roadmap for how we will meet our climate-related commitments while strengthening the long-term resilience and competitiveness of our business,” eBay Chief Sustainability Officer Renee Morin said in the transition plan’s foreword.
Morin told ESG Dive in an interview that the company worked on setting a net-zero target over multiple years, which required “a lot of time and internal strategy and relationship building.” Morin said that producing a transition plan was the “next natural step” for the eBay.
Downstream transportation and distribution makes up the largest source of eBay’s emissions, accounting for 83.9% of the company’s total emissions. eBay does not own or operate its own delivery fleets, warehouses or networks, which makes decarbonizing its shipping operations “a unique challenge” and “a powerful lever for change,” according to the transition plan.
“We have an internal shipping team that has relationships with our external carriers, and we've spent the last four or five years really just looking not just at the data, but also those relationships alongside them, so [the carriers] can understand what our journey is in terms of setting goals related to climate and carbon reductions, and how they pair up with what the carrier's own ambitions are,” Morin said.
eBay is seeking to achieve a 46% emissions reduction through carrier collaboration, and its transitions plan noted that a number of eBay shipping partners — including DHL, UPS and FedEx — all have fleet decarbonization or net-zero goals in place as of December 2025.
The company is looking to achieve 22% of its decarbonization journey through industry collaboration, which the plan said entails working with other shipping companies and non-governmental organizations to “drive shared solutions and accelerate the shift to low-carbon logistics.”
In 2024, the company achieved a goal to power all of its operations on 100% renewable energy a year earlier than its 2025 target date. The transition plan notes that eBay is planning to remove 15% of its emissions through decarbonization from renewable energy use and energy efficiency. Morin said the goal is to maintain its 100% renewable energy benchmark and eBay has already worked to add buffers into its energy contracts.
“As our electricity consumption might grow as we head into the future, we've already buffered into our virtual power purchase agreement that we have here in the United States, just for capacity of green energy, because we wanted to make sure we had a long enough window to see how the products continue to evolve,” she said.
eBay also achieved its 90% operational emissions reduction goal, ahead of its 2030 target, and reduced its scope 1 and 2 emission by 92% as of 2024, according to its latest impact report. The company will look to maintain those reductions through its net-zero target date.
The e-commerce giant’s net-zero target includes a commitment to use “permanent and durable” carbon removals to neutralize any remaining unabated emissions by 2045, according to the transition plan. The company plans to neutralize the 17% of its emissions, after plans to address operational emissions, waste reduction, carrier and industry collaboration, incentivize sustainable decision making and address upstream procurement, business travel and solutions.
eBay is still early in the process of developing its carbon removal strategy and exploring the best approach to reduce its environmental impact, Morin said.
“We've spent a lot of time the last couple of years understanding what the net-zero path looks like,” Morin said. “We have started exploring what our carbon removal investments will look like, and that will start to build as we get closer to 2030 and, obviously, as we get closer to 2045.”
