Amazon Elements is marketed as a “premium” in-house brand, selling vitamins, supplements, and baby wipes with an emphasis on transparency and quality. The branding is clean, the language is reassuring, and the products are priced to compete with trusted household names. None of that changes the fact that it exists to feed Amazon’s monopoly machine, using worker exploitation, predatory pricing, and the company’s surveillance-heavy infrastructure to dominate every category it touches, all while Amazon profits from contracts that uphold apartheid and human rights abuses.
Amazon is rated High Impact because its harms are systemic and interlocking.
Environmental Harm: Delivery fleets, aviation cargo, and data centers generate massive emissions and plastic waste, while public pledges mask lobbying against climate regulation.
Human Rights Violations: Workers face surveillance, injury-level quotas, and unsafe delivery speeds. Migrant workers in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere face wage theft and coercion.
Military & Conflict Complicity: AWS is central to surveillance states. Project Nimbus embeds Amazon in Israel’s occupation and war crimes, supplying AI and data services to its military and government.
The result: consumer spending that powers a machine which entrenches inequality, accelerates climate collapse, and sustains state violence worldwide.