Online shopping is incredibly convenient. Instead of spending hours each weekend going from store to store to buy groceries, household supplies, and any apparel or pet supplies your family needs, you can do it in a few clicks. Everything will arrive at your home or office within the week.
While it’s hard to argue that e-commerce simplifies your routine and saves you time, the tremendous growth of online shopping isn’t as helpful to the environment. It’s creating problems with packaging waste, digital infrastructure, and carbon emissions from transport.
You’re indeed saving gas by staying home, but there’s more to it than that. For every gallon of fuel you save, you have to consider the impact online shopping has on everything from website usage to pick-and-pack machinery, plus the trucks hauling items to a shipping hub and the last-mile transportation to your home.
Transportation and the “Last Mile” Deliveries
Transportation is one of the more damaging aspects of online shopping. The diesel and gasoline used by most tractor-trailers, as well as the fuel for planes, ships, and trains, produce substantial exhaust fumes.
Air vs. Ground
Fast shipping times rely heavily on air freight. Instead of a truck delivering items from a warehouse to a last-mile delivery service like FedEx, UPS, or USPS, they fly them by plane. Planes use a significant amount of jet fuel during takeoff and high-altitude flight, which greatly increases harmful emissions.
Express Shipping
Many retailers compete for your business by offering perks like free express shipping. Those same-day or next-day deliveries certainly are convenient for you, but they’re damaging to the environment.
To get items to you as quickly as possible, they need to go from a warehouse onto the truck and out to your town in hours rather than days. In the process, there’s little time to plan the most fuel-efficient, advantageous route. Goals of planning routes that maximize every gallon of fuel get tossed aside for how do we get it there the fastest?” routing schedules.
Trucks often hit the road before they’re full. You end up with trucks going from Point A to Point B multiple times a week instead of waiting until they’re full and making one trip.
The “Last Mile”
Getting items from a retailer’s warehouse or store to your door takes careful planning. Trucks, trains, or planes bring items from the warehouse or storage room to your local distribution hub. The remainder of the trip is known as “last-mile” logistics.
With last-mile logistics, your package is handed off to a distribution center, and a delivery party like UPS or FedEx brings it to your address. Because they’re usually traveling city streets and rural roads, they lack streamlined transportation for fuel efficiency. They make loads of starts and stops, with idling trucks in between, which uses a lot of fuel and creates massive emissions.
Packaging and the Impact on Landfills and Recycling Centers
You have your order. After unboxing, you’re left with a large box or padded mailer, lots of bubble wrap, air pillows, or packaging peanuts, and clear plastic bags or additional boxes that hold the items. All of this packaging creates problems you may not have considered.
Excessive Materials
How many times have you gotten a box within a box and wondered why they put such a tiny item in a larger box, then packed it full of plastic air pillows? It happens a lot. Single-use plastic and non-recyclable materials like foam peanuts often end up in landfills.
Once in the landfill, those materials take up valuable space. Many landfills across the nation are already nearing capacity. Keeping unnecessary waste out of them is important.
Microplastics
Some people don’t realize that plastic film recycling is possible. It’s not something you can recycle from a curbside container. You have to bring dry, clean plastic film to a drop-off bin. They’re often located in bottle-redemption areas of grocery stores or in the entry lobbies of major retailers.
When plastic mailers and packaging sit in a landfill, small particles break down over time and enter the atmosphere. Microplastics are found in everything from human brain tissue to deep within remote mountain lakes. It’s alarming that these microscopic plastic particles are making their way into our food and water.
Resource Depletion
How many trees do you think are needed to make the boxes going to homes across the U.S.? Estimates are that it takes 3 tons of trees to make 1 ton of corrugated cardboard. Only 71% to 76% of cardboard boxes are properly recycled. As trees are chopped down to make cardboard, the earth is losing a significant number of forests to make more packaging.
Reverse Logistics: Free Returns Aren’t Really Free
Free returns are great for consumers, but they’re costly to the environment. Bracketing is when shoppers order multiple colors or sizes of the same item, intending to return the ones that don’t fit or look good. These returns require trucks to return to your home or a drop-off point and make the trip to a return center for processing.
Online return rates are three times higher than brick-and-mortar retailer return rates. This means fuel emissions skyrocket on the way to and from your home. Plus, many retailers don’t resell returned clothing, textiles, and consumer goods. It’s cheaper to throw them out than to inspect, repair, clean, and repackage them.
The Digital and Physical Infrastructure Needed for Online Shopping
To sell goods online, a store needs a website. That website often stores data like pricing, photos, product descriptions, and store policies in the cloud to save hard-drive space. Search engines, cloud platforms, and inventory software consume massive amounts of energy.
Data centers have to run 24/7 as online shopping isn’t limited to certain hours. Those data centers continuously use electricity. You also need to keep the servers cool, so they use up massive amounts of water during cooling.
One medium-sized data center is estimated to use up to 110 million gallons of water each year. A large data center uses upwards of 5 million gallons per day. Paired with drought conditions, the risk of running out of water is a major concern.
These data centers also require a lot of space to construct. Farmland and green spaces are disappearing to make room for them.
How to Embrace Online Shopping While Protecting the Environment
Online shopping is convenient, but it comes at a cost. We need to come together to address it if we want to leave future generations a healthy environment. Purposeful shopping, smart packaging, and consolidated, slower shipments are three of the most impactful changes we can make.
The next time you make an online purchase, do your part by combining all purchases into a single order. Request delayed shipments on some of your orders if other items will take longer to ship. Finally, reuse your packaging as much as you can to avoid flooding a recycling center or landfill.
If you have to recycle it, keep your cardboard clean and dry. Oily stains or soaked cardboard are no longer recyclable. Bring bubble wrap and air pillows to a plastic film recycling container near you. RecycleNation helps you find the closest option. Use our AI search tool to explore where to bring your unneeded packaging materials.
