Posted on 06/21/2019 6:32:52 PM PDT by EdnaMode
With its acceleration of Prime shipping from two days to one, Amazon established a new normal. Soon after, Walmart and Target came out with their own super-speedy shipping options.
Why it matters: Flying, trucking and delivering millions of packages a day comes with a cost — as shoppers demand faster and faster speed, there has been a sharp environmental impact.
The big picture: Consumers have gotten hooked on speed — and the efficiencies that e-commerce injected into retail are getting erased because now there are more deliveries of smaller numbers of packages.
With this trend, emissions have grown:
The annual sustainability report from UPS, one of the biggest enablers of the e-commerce boom, says it emitted 13.8 million metric tons of CO2 while delivering 5.1 billion packages in 2017, by ground and air.
Emissions from FedEx, the other major shipper, were 15.1 million metric tons in 2017. The U.S. Postal Service emitted about 4.3 million metric tons of CO2 in 2016. (Numbers from both include all mail, including e-commerce and personal packages and letters.)
Together, that's equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of just over 7 million cars, per an EPA calculator. It's almost the combined total number of cars in the states of Illinois and Tennessee. It's also about 0.5% of the total 6 billion metric tons of U.S. CO2 emissions per year. That's "not huge, but it's big. And it's growing," says Costa Samaras of Carnegie Mellon University.
On top of UPS, USPS and FedEx, many other players in parcel delivery — including Amazon itself — are adding to the total impact.
"Nobody is looking at the environmental footprint of being consumers with all of this convenience"
— Beth Davis-Sramek, professor of logistics, Auburn University The backdrop: In theory, e-commerce is good for the environment, says Don Mackenzie, who leads the University of Washington's Sustainable Transportation Lab. Instead of a neighborhood worth of people driving to stores in their personal cars to shop, one truck can deliver everything. But that calculus is changing.
"There are climate benefits to e-commerce, but those disappear as delivery gets faster and faster," says Miguel Jaller, a professor at UC Davis. "It goes against everything they have been achieving in terms of efficiency."
Now, flashy memberships that offer free, fast shipping regardless of the size of a cart have eliminated shoppers' incentive and the shippers' ability to bundle goods. They're instead ordering a steady stream of packages to their doorsteps, pushing e-commerce and logistics companies to keep up by adding trucks, jets and even air hubs.
Amazon started it with Prime, which offers free shipping on 100 million products, whether you order a cartful of things or just one box of tissues. Amazon's retail rivals, Target and Walmart, have done the same:
Walmart has come out with free next-day delivery for orders of $35 or more.
Target has long had a $99 membership program that offers free same-day delivery, and it has just announced same-day for non-members who are willing to pay a flat fee of $9.99.
The increasing warehouse space required to support the barrage of orders also has an impact.
E-commerce companies are building more and more warehouses, particularly on the outskirts of cities, so they can cut delivery times to a few hours. About 255 million square feet of warehouse space is under construction in the U.S., per a new CBRE report — and all of it needs light, heat and air conditioning, notes CMU's Samaras.
And there's more: The packing material that goes into delivery boxes is a major driver of the global plastics crisis, says Axios energy columnist Amy Harder.
But, but, but: There are ways to curb e-commerce's hit to the environment.
Drone delivery uses less energy than vehicles, Samaras tells Axios. "They're super-light and charged by electricity, and electricity is getting cleaner." Both Amazon and Walmart have filed a slew of drone patents.
Electrifying truck fleets can also make a dent, and many shippers, like Amazon and UPS, are adding EVs to cut emissions, but drones are still the cleanest delivery method, Samaras says.
In a statement to Axios, Amazon said it is committed to bring down its contributions to climate change:
"We’ve eliminated more than 244,000 tons of packaging materials and avoided 500 million shipping boxes, and with anticipated and continued progress in electric vehicles, aviation bio fuels, and renewable energy we have set an ambitious goal to reach 50% of all Amazon shipments with net zero carbon by 2030."
Target said it aims to reduce its carbon footprint by 30% by 2030.
Walmart did not respond to an email. Its 2018 report on sustainability set a goal to reduce emissions 18% from 2015 to 2025.
Cheap, plentiful energy is one of the best signs of a prosperous society.
It may be coming. But then, where will all the horses live and eat and go to the bathroom; what about that pollution?
Monday I bought a few things for our Kitten on Amazon and they still have not shipped it ,D’oh
Something that liberals despise for reasons that defy my ability to figure out.
"Liberals" actually "Progressives"/Leftists, want total, unbridled, political power.
The new weather religion of "Climate Change", gives them every reason to have total, unbridled, political power.
To push the scam, they have to be against cheap, plentiful energy.
Thank you for the food for thought.
Been a long week and I am not thinking all that straight.
Liberals won’t acknowledge this but environmentalism is way up on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The harder life is day to day, the less people care about the environment. And environmentalism is a flop as a religion. Hubby and I enjoy watching live camera feeds from mainline rail arteries where trains more than two to three miles long are replete with Prime, FedEx, UPS and USPS containers and trailers and are a lot more efficient transcontinent than trucking. It is the lifeblood of the nation and a sign of hope for the middle class.
At 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gas, that totals about 11 gallons of gas per person in the US.
A gallon of gasoline weighs approximately 6 pounds.
So how do they reckon it gives off a more than 3X higher volume of waste than the initial product?
So how do they reckon it gives off a more than 3X higher volume of waste than the initial product?
One molecule of CO2 weighs 3.66 times as much as its constituent carbon atom (12+2*16)/12.
If gasoline is pure octane (C8H18) it is 84% carbon, or about 5.3 pounds of carbon per gallon of gas which will produce 19.4 pounds per gallon. Play around with the mixture of hydrocarbon atoms and you'll get slightly different weights of CO2 produced.
The authors are ignorant of what shopping was like pre-Internet. I would often spend half of Saturday driving all over the place to many different stores trying to find the right parts I needed for a home project. Now I do the research online, find the part, order it, and it’s delivered to me in a day or two. The TOTAL miles driven today by the Amazon driver or the UPS driver is far below what I used to drive in the old days.
This is a flawed analysis.
It is basic chemistry.
Gasoline is a mix of hydrocarbons.
Hydrocarbons are some variant of CxHy. Methane is the simplist at CH4 (one carbon and four Hydrogen atoms forming a molecule of Methane). Methane is not in gasoline, because at room temperature and pressure, it is a gas(vapor).
Carbon has an atomic weight of 12, hydrogen an atomic weight of 1. When burned with oxygen in the air, the carbon atoms forms CO2, a molecule with one carbon and two oxygen atoms. The hydrogen atoms combine with oxygen to form water vapor H2O. CO2 has an molecular weight of 44. 12 for the carbon, 32 for the two oxygen atoms(16 each).
One atom of Carbon has a weight of 12, one molecule of CO2 has a weight of 44. So, a hydrocarbon molecule with several carbons and some hydrogen atoms produces Carbon dioxide at a ration of 12/44, with the hydrogens having much less effect because they only have an atomic wight of 1 each.
That is how you produce about 3X the weight of Carbon dioxide for each weight of Hydrocarbon burned.
It is the extra weight of the oxygen that boosts the weight of the carbon dioxide.
The volume is much, much more, because CO2 is a gas at ordinary temperatures, while the hydrocarbons in gasoline are a liqued.
Congrats!
Good point. Next, we may have smaller, more efficient drones delivering packages.
yes, if only we could go back to delivering everything by Conestoga Wagon, the planet would quit melting ...
If Amazon was smart they’d offer a ‘7-day save the climate’ delivery option.
Let’s see how many of these pukes take them up on that.
Right on target. Failing to factor in the reduction due to taking all those cars on all those shopping trips off the road is a major flaw.
We really need cheap matter transporters/receivers...
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