Silvia Benavides

Setting sustainability strategy for North America operations

Silvia set the North America Operations sustainability strategy. She aligned operations, finance, and senior leadership on goals, resources, and execution. That work contributed to a 7% company-wide reduction in emissions per shipped unit in 2025, as reported in Amazon’s 2025 Sustainability Report. She secured $75M to pilot and scale decarbonization across more than 900 North American facilities, in transportation, construction, energy efficiency, and waste reduction. She also secured funding and leadership support for Amazon’s mass timber delivery station in Elkhart, Indiana.

She directed the forecasting and target-setting that tracked progress toward Amazon’s net-zero carbon by 2040 commitment, and consolidated fragmented sustainability efforts into one organization. On the operations side, she identified two sortation capacity solutions. Together they cut inventory placement defects by 34%, worth an estimated $268M in annual savings. She served on the Worldwide Operations Sustainability Steering Committee and received the Think Big Award for innovative leadership.

Turning EV investment into emissions results

Silvia built the North America Last Mile sustainability team from the ground up, scoping priority areas and hiring the right people.

She made sure last-mile electric vehicle investment produced emissions results, not just vehicle purchases. With the fleet team, she set monthly deployment and utilization targets. She created the EV Packages metric, packages delivered by EV, to track delivered savings, and partnered with the charging team to extend EVs to rural routes. She grew an initial three-year vision into a $24M portfolio funding energy efficiency and decarbonization pilots. She designed the sustainability capital allocation strategy used by leadership in North America, Europe, and Japan. She also built GHG Protocol-aligned emissions forecasting that leadership used to prioritize investments.

Grounded in operations and analytics

Before sustainability, Silvia launched the Worldwide Operations Analytics team. She designed and deployed a global Balanced Scorecard that standardized performance measurement across the network, and led an organizational redesign for 580 associates. In operations, she doubled a technical support team from 400 to 800 associates for the launches of Alexa, Kindle, and Fire TV. She also led an inbound team of 300 that exceeded safety, quality, and productivity targets.