6 comments ·Mar 25, 2021

What's the Environmental Impact of Online Shopping?

by Krystina Jarvis

Listen to the audio of this post here:

This post first appeared in our weekly Make Waves Mondays email series on March 22, 2021.

Oh hello there, friend!

In the last couple of months, I’ve started getting more and more messages asking if we have a pickup option for local customers.

This is something I’ve thought about - a lot. And right now, we don’t. And that’s highly intentional. But I’m realizing it’s not something I’ve talked about publicly before.

So today I want to take a little deep dive into the environmental impacts of online shopping versus in-person, and how we are optimizing our systems to get you the essentials you need, as fast as possible, as safely as possible, and with the smallest carbon footprint possible.

Because the answer to “which is more sustainable - online or in person?” may surprise you.

Packaging

Okay, let’s start with the obvious first. Packaging.

Online shopping comes with a lot of packaging. We inherently know this. We’ve probably seen our neighborhood recycling bins overflowing with Amazon boxes over the last year.

But what’s the real impact of all that packaging?

According to a 2011 LA Times article reviewing a Carnegie Mellon study, packaging only accounts for 22% of a package’s carbon footprint.

Now, 22% isn’t a small percentage. And, yes, that percentage would be smaller from shopping in-person with our own shopping bags. But...that’s not the end of the story.

What We’re Doing

We are always doing everything we can to minimize our packaging. Learn more about the oh-so-many ways we're keeping things zero waste over on the blog!

Shipping

First and foremost, we reuse boxes whenever we possibly can. Seriously...take a look at our current collected box stash.

A Drop in the Ocean Sustainable Living Zero Waste Shop

This isn’t even all of it.

Most of our boxes come from my Buy Nothing Group. When I’m running low, I’ll put a call out to the group for small boxes and there’s always plenty to go around. I’ll collect them once a week on our local delivery route, and remove all plastic tape and labels. I firmly believe that the consumer shouldn’t be responsible for packaging, so by removing plastic tape and labels, and only using recyclable paper tape and paper labels, we’re making it easy peasy for you to reuse or properly recycle your box.

We also don’t just reuse shipping boxes. My friend Donarius has trained the technicians at the car dealership he works at to save parts boxes. My friend Rob drinks a lot of tea, and I’ll use the empty tea boxes to ship bars of soaps. We’ve used Girl Scout Cookies boxes, Cheez-It boxes...whatever boxes I can get my hands on, we’ll use it to ship orders if we can.

As far as internal packing materials go, I’ve literally never bought packing materials. There’s always SO MUCH available. All of our vendors ship with kraft paper, so I just fold up that paper and reuse it in our shipments. No new paper necessary.

Local Delivery

For local deliveries, we don’t even use boxes. Or bags. Countless studies have shown that paper bags are actually worse for the environment than plastic. The only thing they really have going for them is that they’re biodegradable. And a cotton tote needs to be used 131 times before it has a better carbon footprint than a plastic bag. An organic tote? 20,000 times. (Check out this NPR piece.)

More on the impacts of these different materials in a future blog post.

From the very beginning, I’ve refused to purchase any kind of shopping bags for the shop - even when we were doing in-person pop-up events. The only bags in the shop are our Umutima Bags, handmade in Rwanda and supporting female survivors of violence. That I can get behind.

When we deliver your items locally, we keep as much unpackaged as we can, and when we do need to wrap something for a little added protection from the elements, we use that same reused kraft paper from our vendors. We’ll just use a little bit of jute twine to tie a few things together if we need to, but other than that, there are no new materials used in your delivery.

This one time I decided to get real cutesy with our local delivery notes.

Carbon Emissions

Okay, so, packaging is only a small piece of the puzzle. What’s the carbon footprint of online and in-person shopping, then?

According to that same Carnegie Mellon study, consumer driving accounts for 65% of an item’s footprint when it’s purchased in-store. 65 percent! Umm. What.

As surprising as it may be, delivery trucks are actually way more efficient for delivering packages than for you to pick it up at the store. I couldn’t find these numbers for USPS, but according to UPS in 2010, they use about 0.117 gallons of fuel to deliver one package. An average passenger car would use about 0.636 gallons to pick up that same package. That’s five times more gasoline than delivery!

Imma try REAL HARD not to geek out too much about this next section. I’m a data nerd, in case you don’t know yet :)

A 2013 study from MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics took a DEEP dive into consumer behaviors and how different types of shopping have different environmental impacts. The behaviors ranged from doing everything in-person to doing everything online to everything in between.

They found that a shopper who does everything in person (product research, purchasing, and returns) has a higher carbon footprint than a shopper who does everything online. The exception is when the online shopper opts for expedited shipping. In this case, the online shopper does have a higher footprint than the in-person shopper.

A Drop in the Ocean Sustainable Living Zero Waste Shop On the road for some local deliveries!

When they broke shopper behaviors down even further, that’s where I really started to geek out.

A fully in-person shopper (let’s call her Kelly) has a carbon footprint of about 3.1 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent.

CO2 equivalent (CO2e) is the standard unit of measure for carbon footprints. It takes all the greenhouse gas emissions and standardizes them to carbon dioxide emissions, rather than breaking them out into carbon dioxide, methane, etc.

About 2.5kg of Kelly’s 3.1kg impact is from her own transportation. That’s about 80% of her impact. Yikes.

Let’s compare that to a fully-online shopper. Let’s call her Joan.

Joan’s footprint is about 1.5kg CO2e, so we’re already at about half the impact of Kelly’s. The majority of their impact is, yes, packaging (about 1kg). Delivery only accounts for about 0.3kg of Joan’s impact, and there’s no consumer transportation impact.

NOW. Where this gets really interesting - and the main point of today’s post - is when we look at an online shopper who opts for a local pickup option instead of delivery. Let’s call her Louise.

Louise’s footprint is about 2.0kg CO2e. So, her footprint is still less than Kelly’s, but more than Joan’s. About 1.5kg (75%) of Louise’s emissions are from her own transportation.

Feeling overwhelmed by numbers? I get it. Here’s a handy-dandy graph from the study 🥰

Kelly = Traditional Shopper | Joan = Cybernaut | Louise = C - Pick Up