What Insights Are We Gaining From eComm Sustainability Studies?
I’d like to start this post with a shocking statistic…
“Every year 165 billion packages are shipped in the U.S., which uses enough cardboard to equal more than 1 billion trees.” (Does E-Commerce Care About Sustainability; Forbes November 5, 2019; Blake Morgan Senior Contributor):
Wow - 1 billion trees! Ms. Morgan goes on to discuss many companies working on better solutions. Thank you.
Packaging is a huge factor but still just one piece of the puzzle. What about the highway miles, local delivery miles, and sometimes air freight? Or from the other perspective (might traditional shopping be worse?), what about a shopper’s trip to the store?
When considering everything, is online shopping better or worse for the environment? There’ve been a few landmark studies published and they tend to say…
…it depends.
There are just so many variables, particularly around the consumer’s behavior. Urban vs rural travel distances. Single-item shopping trips vs. multi-item, multi-store trips vs. swing-by-the-store-on-the-way-home trips . Deliver to home vs pick-up in a store. And more.
All the studies suggest that an optimized 50-stop urban delivery is more efficient than 50 individual car trips. From that perspective, it makes sense.
In any event, I’ve collected a few good studies and posted in the Interesting Reads page. One of my earliest reads, and favorites, is a thesis paper from MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics. Among many interesting findings, it says:
On average online shopping is about 50% the emissions impact of traditional shopping.
However, traditional shopping results varied tremendously, from approximately 1kgCO2 up to almost 8kgCO2. The comparable online shopper ranged from approximately 1.5 to 2 kgCO2. It should be noted the research applied Monte Carlo analysis to each consumer behavior, with over 10,000 samples.
Consumer transportation emission consumption in traditional store shopping is the most significant emissions contributor.
Packaging is the biggest emissions contributor in online shopping.
Some variations of consumer pick-up can be as emissions-efficient as any shopping behavior studied
It suggests that packaging is less impactful than consumer transportation, on average. Although this would depend on product (large or small?), proximity and consumer routing (is it a single trip to the store, or stopping by while in transit?).
I think this last point really matters. For me personally, I tend to shop differently online vs. store. For example, I have a “1 item buy” online habit…like, “oh, I need something special for a home project” so jump online and within a few minutes place an order. It shows up 2-3 days later. Whereas with store shopping, I’m most likely to arrange short errand, stopping by a few different stores for a handful of things we need. So I’m likely buying many items on a store run, whereas 1 item online. So for me, especially based on my proximity to stores, running errands seems more sustainable (provided I avoid one-off store runs).
The good news is this MIT study includes emissions factors for elements of the process (factors for cardboard, passenger vehicle driving, delivery van driving, etc.). So we can better study our own behavior and understand more, which I’m sure to do.
So this learning continues. For now, takeaways include:
Packaging for eComm shopping is a big deal
Last mile delivery can also be big, but decently optimized routes are actually fairly efficient because so many stops can be absorbed into the route; interestingly the parcel journey up until the last mile delivery does not appear to be such a big deal
On the other hand, the consumer’s drive to the store can be an even bigger deal. Single store trips, for one or fewer items, will tilt the math to favor online shopping. More impactful than packaging.
Customer pick-up options might be real winners.
Interesting. More to come.