You want to buy some new towels.

Imagine heavy traffic moving at a crawl. And all those vehicles spewing out noxious fumes.

Now imagine sitting in your pajamas with your little dog curled up next to you on the chair as you click links on your computer screen and pick two-day shipping. Two days later, the set of towels you just ordered show up on your doorstep.

Those pictures aren’t alternatives. You might have pictured yourself sitting in that traffic driving to a store.  But what about the diesel delivery truck sitting in that traffic on the way to your house?

Online shopping in general vs shopping in stores

A few years ago, I compared online shopping and going to a store. It turned out to be a more complicated question than it seemed at first.

You save your own gasoline when you shop online instead of driving to a store and back.

But the delivery truck makes several stops from the time it leaves its home base until it returns. It plans the most efficient route and spreads fuel costs among several different customers. On the other hand, it probably runs on diesel, which emits more pollutants than your car.

When you go to the store, you can take your own shopping bags. You won’t bring home any extra packaging. When you order online, the same products come in a carton. The carton also has bubble wrap or other packing material to keep the products from sliding around in the box. That adds to our mountain of junk.

Suppose you buy four different items. If you find them all at the same store, shopping online wastes much more packaging than going to the store. But what if you have to go to four stores to find all the items, but only one online site?

Therefore, online shopping can be more environmentally friendly. Or less. But let’s not forget that your purchases don’t go directly from the factory to either your home or the store. They go to at least one warehouse in between.

Ordinarily, the truck that leaves the warehouse is full. If it goes to more than one destination, it takes the most efficient route. The “last mile” of shipping has the highest environmental cost. Driving from one warehouse to another can take advantage of economies of scale. Driving from one warehouse to multiple homes and offices can’t.

Two-day shipping: What hath Amazon wrought?

I have worked in or around some warehouses. Even the ones that looked vast are puny compared to what Amazon operates. It is possible to walk through them to pick out items. They probably use forklifts or electric golf carts to carry stuff.

Now consider the warehouses that can hold the vast array of products and quantities necessary for an operation the size of Amazon. They need conveyor belts and sophisticated robotics. These warehouses must suck a lot more power than the ones you may have seen.

Amazon’s Prime service touts ease, convenience, speed, and savings. The company has made returns very easy. As a result, more people shop online more often than ever before.

Prime isn’t free, of course. It costs subscribers $119 a year. But then, they don’t pay for shipping every time they order. It feels free.

Whatever Amazon does, other companies must follow suit to keep up. So whenever I say Amazon here, Walmart, Target, and maybe your local grocery chain do the same things.

The environmental harm of two-day shipping

People who shop online still shop in stores, too. Online shopping doesn’t reduce their use of their own cars.

Unfortunately, people don’t see the environmental problems as clearly as they see the convenience.

Transportation

When Amazon can take a week to deliver your product, it can put all your order in as few packages as possible. Its trucks carry many packages together.

Suppose you order two items and the nearest warehouse doesn’t have one of them in stock. With traditional shipping, it waits to receive more stock and then ships your order in a single box.

With two-day shipping, it can ship only the one product. Another warehouse that has the other item ships it. That means two packages and two trucks. More than two trucks, really, because the same ones that carry your purchases from a warehouse probably deliver to another warehouse, not your front porch.

And the trucks that deliver your products can’t wait to have a large enough load to fill them up. They may have to travel only half full. Which means that another half-empty truck has to take the products that would have filled the first to capacity.

Amazon’s ability to deliver your purchase in two days results from very sophisticated logistics. Unfortunately, it can’t consolidate its shipments as much. It has to use more vehicles, which means more traffic and more emissions. And your car pollutes less than the diesel trucks.

Companies are moving warehouses from remote rural locations closer to town. That cuts down on the miles these trucks have to travel, but cheap urban land suitable for warehouse construction tends to be in poorer parts of town. Urban warehouses disproportionately affect air quality and noise profiles in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

A rush package from a distant warehouse has to travel by plane as well as by truck. The much slower trucks are more energy-efficient than airplanes.

Faster! Faster!

Not content with two-day shipping, Amazon now offers one-day shipping or even two-hour shipping. It can’t use delivery trucks to provide such speedy service.

Independent contractors driving their own car pick up and deliver products in much the same way as Uber or Lyft drivers pick up and deliver passengers.

Delivery companies keep their fleets close to the warehouses they service. Contractors must drive from their home to a warehouse.

They probably drive farther to the warehouse than you would drive to a store. Then they drive from there to your house. They can’t fit as much in their cars as in a delivery truck, so they must make more trips to the warehouse than a truck. At the end of the day, they drive back home.

Trash

Not only are Americans buying more online, but they’re also buying more frequently and fewer items at a time. So a single children’s book comes in a box that could have held a lot more.

The cardboard in the boxes is among the most easily recyclable of all packaging, but only if it makes it into the recycling stream instead of the landfill.

We have consumed more and more cardboard in recent years but recycled less of it. And recycling operations that have long depended on shipping cardboard to China now find it closed to all but the cleanest bales.

The cost of convenient return policies

Lenient return policies have a different disadvantage. If you want to buy clothes in a store, you try them on. If something doesn’t fit or doesn’t look as good on you as you expect, you put it back and try on something else. When you’re satisfied, you take your purchases to the checkout counter.

When you order the same clothes online, you can’t try them on. If you’re not satisfied, you have to return them. Amazon and its competitors make returning products as simple as possible. Which means more trucks to return them to the warehouse.

What can we do?

Some people love to complain about the evils of big corporations. But Amazon offers two-day shipping and faster because that’s what its customers want. We can’t blame corporate America for our love of convenience.

Amazon has been a leader when it comes to purchasing renewable energy and reducing packaging waste. But it has long resisted calls for transparency about its greenhouse gas emissions.

Shareholders, including Amazon employees, have pressured the company to disclose them. It has recently promised to do so

Etsy and eBay are already among the few ecommerce companies that disclose information about their environmental impact. Amazon and other giant companies don’t make that information available to investors or consumers. If these large companies start to disclose such details, competitors will feel pressure to do the same.

Amazon controls nearly half of the ecommerce market. Other companies, including grocery delivery companies, must be able to match whatever Amazon offers. Maybe Amazon could offer a “green” shipping option and make sure buyers know the environmental savings.

But as consumers we can take our own steps:

• Buy what you need, but curb impulse buying. Buying less in the first place means less to ship.
• Buy far enough in advance that you don’t need such fast shipping.
• If you add only a single item to your online cart, wait to complete the order until you have added enough more to make a reasonably big shipment.
• If you get groceries online, buy for a week at a time, not just what you want today.
• When you shop in stores, consolidate your errands. Visit several stores on the same trip and plan your most efficient route.

Sources:

Amazon to disclose more details on environmental impact / Emily Chasan, Transport Topics. February 20, 2019
The environmental cost of free 2-day shipping / Andy Murdock, Vox. November 17, 2017
The hidden environmental cost of Amazon Prime’s free, fast shipping / Nicole Nguyen. Buzzfeed. July 21, 2018

Photo credits:
Traffic jam. Some rights reserved by lorenz.markus97
Shopping online. Some rights reserved by Keith Williamson
Amazon Prime boxes. Used with permission of Quote Catalog
FedEx truck. Image by John R Perry from Pixabay
Car exhaust. Some rights reserved by eutrophication&hypoxia.
Wastepaper bales. Source unknown
Warehouse. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons