Nothing wasted: designing for people and the planet

How empathy, collaboration, and authenticity drive Priscila Okyere, Amazon’s global senior manager of circular solutions and waste reduction.

Growing up in Ghana, Priscilla Okyere saw the effects of waste firsthand. Discarded materials weren’t just in landfills—they cluttered neighborhoods and polluted waterways. Those early experiences taught her to think about waste more holistically and consider how we can better use resources to improve people’s lives.

A trained civil engineer, Okyere is now Amazon’s global senior manager of circular solutions and waste reduction, leading teams focused on reducing waste across our operations. Her job is to design smarter systems that use fewer resources, reuse more materials, and help keep products and packaging out of landfills.

For Okyere, circularity is more than an environmental principle. It’s about building a better future.

“Circularity in sustainability isn’t just about recycling,” she said. “It’s about rethinking how we define value and working to create a world where nothing and no one is left behind.”

Under her leadership, Amazon achieved a landfill diversion rate¹ of 85% in 2024, our highest diversion rate yet. We also publicly reported operational waste performance for the first time. It’s progress—and a cultural shift. Amazon employees have championed waste reduction initiatives that were critical to reaching this milestone, she said.

To help make it happen, Okyere focused on connection. She brought together teams that were already working individually on waste reduction and helped them see how their efforts dovetailed. By securing the early support of Amazon’s senior leaders, she also created momentum that spanned Amazon’s many teams around the world. What started as scattered efforts became a coordinated movement, uniting thousands of employees around a common goal.

Coordination made it easier to scale ideas across Amazon’s diverse businesses. Whole Foods Market, for example, collaborated with Too Good To Go, an app that aims to eliminate food waste, diverting more than 630,000 meals from landfills in 2024 alone. In fulfillment operations, teams expanded the use of reusable carts (a replacement for disposable wood pallets and cardboard containers), helping avoid 85 million single-use pallets. Each program reinforced the same principle: prevent waste first, reuse where possible, and recycle as a last resort.

That alignment turned into innovation. Working with grocery, fulfillment operations, and corporate business teams, Okyere helped expand recycling programs for materials like cardboard. Along with wood, these materials account for 65% of Amazon’s waste footprint, which is now almost entirely recycled. Her work catalyzed the redesign of equipment with modular parts that can be reused. For materials that are hard to recycle, Okyere’s team built strategic relationships to test new solutions. A collaboration with Glacier, an artificial intelligence and robotics company, is being tested to improve how waste is sorted, and to help reduce contamination in recycling streams.

“We can build the best systems in the world, but none of it matters unless people believe in the mission,” Okyere said. “Every person wakes up wanting to do good and to be valued. When you start with that, you build the trust needed to make sustainability work.”

Okyere believes baking sustainability into Amazon’s operations is more about influence than mandates. She builds programs that empower teams to find their own ways to reduce waste. Her approach relies on clear communication, shared accountability, and giving people the tools they need to take ownership of the results.

“At the heart of circularity is people,” she said. “You can’t close the loop without them.”

She encourages each person to be themselves, because different perspectives are what drive innovation—each person is essential to a system’s success.

“Sustainability only works when people feel part of the solution,” she said. “It’s not about perfection; it’s about participation. The more people see themselves in the mission, the stronger and faster the results.”

Learn more about Amazon's approach to waste and sustainability in this video.

Read more about Okyere’s work and Amazon’s progress in the 2024 Sustainability Report.

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¹ Our landfill diversion rate tracks the materials we divert from landfills via recycling and incineration with energy recovery (a process that involves burning waste to generate heat that can be used to produce electricity or steam).