Amazon has opened its first mass‑timber delivery station at Elkhart, Indiana (DII5), a 39‑acre facility designed to operate as a working laboratory for low‑carbon building systems. The site features more than half a million board feet of southern yellow pine in walls and ceilings, lower‑carbon concrete, generous daylighting and over 170 EV charging stalls, all intended to test which sustainability measures can scale across Amazon’s global portfolio.
“We have experimented with and implemented a lot of sustainability initiatives over the years,” said Daniel Mallory, Amazon’s vice president of global realty. “DII5 continues that effort by taking a culmination of a lot of big ideas, not just in how we operate our facilities, but in how we build them,” Mallory said. Amazon will treat the site as an operational testbed, gathering the complex data needed to decide which materials and systems merit wider rollout.
Wood Central understands that timber is DII5’s defining feature. Mass timber — engineered by laminating standard softwood into large panels and beams — delivers structural performance comparable to concrete and steel while dramatically reducing embodied carbon and storing atmospheric CO₂ in long‑lived building elements.
Kristen Dotson, Amazon’s principal for sustainable buildings, said locking carbon into timber for 50 to 100 years creates a tangible carbon “bank,” preventing that CO₂ from returning to the atmosphere and materially lowering a building’s lifecycle emissions. “The game‑changing part around mass timber is that it’s taking a ready commodity and turning it into this structural element that can replace much of the concrete and steel that goes into a building,” Dotson said.
DII5 pairs its timber structure with proven performance systems: heat pumps, clerestory daylighting and LED controls to cut operational energy; a 15,000‑gallon rainwater capture and filtration system for toilet reuse; and more than 170 EV chargers supporting roughly 125 electric delivery vehicles already on site. Local fabricators supplied and finished the timber components, and lower‑carbon concrete technologies were used where concrete remained necessary.
Marty Brennan, design architect and sustainability lead at ZGF, described DII5 as both a design and supply‑chain experiment. “The scheme brings together numerous partners from across the building industry to create a welcoming experience of light, wood, and native prairies,” he said, reflecting an intent to pair environmental performance with material and spatial quality.
Amazon will judge DII5 against measurable outcomes: construction impacts, lifecycle carbon, cost, fire performance, durability and constructability. If mass timber and low‑carbon concrete deliver reliable emissions reductions without meaningful cost or schedule penalties, Amazon’s procurement scale could create immediate market demand for engineered wood and low‑carbon concrete alternatives, accelerating broader adoption.
The station builds on Amazon’s prior use of mass timber and lower‑carbon concrete at HQ2 and other flagship sites, alongside deployments of CarbonCure concrete technology across its portfolio. Together, these demonstration projects and procurement commitments signal a strategy of pairing technical proof‑points with buying power to shift supply chains and standards.
