The following article from the online magazine Salon surveys the available
info in parsing out the question that many wonder: is shopping online
better for the environment than going to a neighborhood store?
kelly
URL:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/12/07/ecology/print.html
It's not easy being green
Is online shopping good for the environment or just a better way to be
as wasteful as we want to be?
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By Katharine Mieszkowski
Dec. 7, 2000 | You know who you are.
You haven't bought a thing for any of your 27 adorable nieces and
nephews, and you dread the throngs of wild-eyed parents stalking Toys
"R" Us this time of year, their sweaty desperation sweetly underscored
by the schmaltzy tunes of "Jingle Bell Rocks" and "Grandma Got Run
Over by a Reindeer." You're in holiday shopping denial. And you'll
probably end up loading up your credit cards with overnight delivery
charges at the last minute, buying out the Web's entire stash of
5-foot-tall plush Harry Potter goblets of fire on the afternoon of
Dec. 23.
Not so fast, e-commerce Santa.
Consider this: How would your adorable little nieces and nephews feel
if they knew your shameless procrastination contributes to the
destruction of the planet, sacrificing their priceless futures for a
few moments of greedy joy on Christmas morning? Don't you realize that
all those air-shipped "next day" deliveries are five times as
fuel-inefficient as gifts sent by plodding trucks?
OK, so the little buggers probably couldn't care less. But do you?
Now that we're fully in the throes of the ritualistic consumer frenzy
that is the holiday shopping season, probably the last thing on most
Net shoppers' minds is what impact all that clicking to buy has on the
environment. The truth is, even policymakers, social scientists,
environmentalists and engineers don't really know for sure.
Researchers are only now beginning to study what e-commerce means for
the Earth. The first major conference on the topic, the Joint
Symposium on E-commerce and the Environment, in October in New York,
brought together 100 researchers from the likes of Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory and Ford Motor Co. to compare notes on everything
from e-commerce and energy consumption to land use.
"Everyone is just starting to wake up and realize that e-commerce
might have environmental effects that we aren't aware of," says H.
Scott Matthews, a researcher with the Green Design Initiative, a
faculty and student research group at Carnegie Mellon University that
is conducting one of the few major studies of the issue.
But no one knows exactly what those effects might be. "Anyone who
tells you that they've got this figured out is probably exaggerating,"
says David Rejeski, a former researcher at the Environmental
Protection Agency who is now at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public
and International Affairs at Princeton.
It's easy to imagine how good shopping online could be for the
environment. After all, retail space with its hardwood floors, heating
and cooling costs and huge parking lots can be a bigger drain on
natural resources than warehouse space. And think of all the trips to
the mall in the old gas-guzzling SUV that one efficient delivery truck
speeding to and fro in a single neighborhood can eliminate. Plus,
e-commerce cuts out entire steps in the distribution chain, presumably
making the experience of buying online better for all. Click your way
to a better world, baby!
But what such back-of-the-envelope analysis leaves out is the knotty
vagaries of human behavior. We buy three shirts online only to ship
back two that don't fit by air. We order virtually, but print out the
receipts for our records. We buy five different books from Barnes &
Noble online and have them sent in five different packages because we
can't bother to wait for the total order to be filled. Wouldn't one
trip to the bookstore have been more energy-efficient? And then
there's the instant-gratification itch. It's the nagging impulse that
says: "I want it now!" -- or, at the latest, tomorrow morning -- even
if that means that an airplane will have to fly whatever it is to me
from the other side of the country, so I won't have to bother to get
off my couch.
Will shopping online bring new efficiency to our acquisitiveness or
only give us one more way to clutter up the world with still more
stuff? Should we be heartened by the news that the rate of growth in
our energy consumption is slowing, or dismayed at how much easier it
is than ever before to buy something we don't really need?
One early report on the issue, released last December by the Center
for Energy and Climate Solutions, a nonprofit that helps companies
reduce greenhouse gas emissions, paints a rosy picture of a clean
e-commerce future. "Christmas shoppers can minimize the environmental
impact of gift giving by shopping online and shipping presents
directly to the recipient," says Joe Romm, executive director of the
center, citing the benefits of replacing car trips with delivery
trucks and energy-intensive retail space with warehouses. The energy
savings aren't hard to fathom. "If you're going to have the gift
shipped anyway, it's got to be better to order it online." You save
not only a trip to the mall but the extra environmental costs entailed
in sending the product from a warehouse to a retail outlet and then to
your friend or relative.
Romm's study found that even shipping two 5-pound packages overnight
would result in 40 percent less energy consumption than a 20-mile
round trip to the mall to fetch the same hefty gifts. So maybe we can
all click our way to a cleaner, brighter future. It's these kinds of
calculations that have led Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, to brag
about the environmental benefits of e-commerce.
But other studies haven't been so bullish on online shopping as a
green alternative to old-fashioned bricks and mortar. Researchers with
Carnegie Mellon's Green Design Initiative scrutinized Amazon.com's
proud pledge to deliver every pre-ordered copy of "Harry Potter and
the Goblet of Fire" to eager readers via FedEx overnight on its July
publication date. More than 250,000 books shot around the country in a
dedicated fleet of more than 100 airplanes and 9,000 trucks, enabling
the online bookstore to compete during the hyped release with the
timeliness of a neighborhood bookstore. Just think of how many extra
boxes it took to ship those books individually instead of in crates of
10 copies each to stores.
And while a truck efficiently delivering many packages to different
homes may theoretically eliminate dozens of car trips, in reality
that's not how most people shop. "The marginal effect of buying a book
at the mall is small if, as part of the trip, other items are bought
or other things are done," wrote the authors of "Harry Potter and the
Ozone Layer," an article in the November IEEE Spectrum. Most
important, air transit uses five times the fuel of trucking. Loath to
draw any definitive conclusions on early research, they declared, "The
net effect of e-commerce is unclear." But the basic question remains:
Do we really need books overnight? Matthews says the Green Design
Initiative has invited Bezos to a workshop on the topic of e-commerce
and the environment in June, but, alas, "he hasn't responded to our
requests yet."
Yet another study, this one by researchers at the New Jersey Institute
of Technology, found that buying a computer online was worse for the
environment than purchasing one from a store, especially when
overnight shipping was factored in. They found that only when a
company also used the Web to streamline its inventory and distribution
were there environmental benefits. Simply selling online wasn't enough
to make a difference.
So what's a Net shopper to believe? "We're moving into the new economy
and we don't know much about the environmental impact, and no one
seems to care," says Rejeski, formerly with the EPA. Rejeski decries
the absence of government funding for research on the topic: "It's
ironic to me that the U.S., which has so quickly identified itself
with the new economy, hasn't put up the money to identify the social
and environmental impacts of the new economy."
One real wild card in the whole ecology vs. e-commerce equation is
human behavior. "The big question mark is we don't know how people's
shopping habits are going to be changed due to online shopping," says
Nevin Cohen, a fellow at the Tellus Institute, which organized the
October symposium.
"Will people just buy more and more things because it's even easier?
And will people want it air-shipped overnight, and will they air-ship
it back when they don't want it?" asks Alissa Gravits, executive
director of Co-op America, a nonprofit environmental group. If
e-commerce makes it so much easier for the "born to shop" masses to
buy things, some ecologically minded critics worry the additional
consumption could wipe out whatever incremental environmental benefit
there may be to transactions done online. Josh Karliner, executive
editor of Corporate Watch, a watchdog group, puts it this way: "The
biggest environmental problem in the world today is American
overconsumption. So if we're going to consume more and more resources
by buying more superfluous goods over the Web, then e-commerce is only
contributing to the biggest environmental problem in the world today."
Still, there are some macroeconomic energy consumption trends that are
heartening. According to Romm, between 1992 and 1996 the demand for
energy rose 2.3 percent a year, while from 1996 to 2000 the demand for
energy rose only 1 percent; at the same time, gross domestic product
increased.
"That's a very large drop," says Romm, a former acting assistant
secretary of energy at the U.S. Department of Energy. "I think some of
it is because the Internet allows a type of growth that doesn't
require as much inventory and as much energy and as much
transportation."
Even in the face of inconclusive research about the ecology of
e-commerce, there's one fact that's crystal clear. Mainstream shopping
sites could do more to help. E-commerce companies could painlessly
offer a "green" shipping option. All it would take is marketing ground
shipping as a way to help the environment, and letting consumers make
the choice themselves. "I've suggested it to Amazon.com, and it isn't
a priority for them," says Cohen. With e-commerce still struggling in
its toddlerhood it would take an enlightened e-tailer, indeed, to
fight the customer's urge for instant gratification. Who wants to
point out how much slower your distribution is than a trip to the
store?
Romm says the tightening of belts at many dot-coms may paradoxically
benefit the environment. "I think that with the collapse of the NASDAQ
and the dot-coms you're seeing a lot fewer companies offering free
overnight [shipping] because it's too big of an expense." How's that
medicine? Fewer freebies may ultimately be good for you!
And don't be so quick to blame the companies. There hasn't exactly
been an outcry from concerned consumers demanding greener shipping
options from e-commerce sites, or even an outcry from environmental
groups, for that matter. "I think a lot of people are still in the
honeymoon phase with e-commerce to think anything bad about it," says
Matthews. "It's none of the companies' faults they're providing the
service that customers want. If no one wanted it overnight, they
wouldn't be selling it."
And environmental groups may also be in the throes of just such a
honeymoon. Joel Makower, president of the Green Business Network,
points out that many environmental groups are engaged in e-commerce
partnerships with sites that market so-called green products. "I think
the environmental groups have to look fairly carefully at their own
e-commerce offerings before they can participate in any larger
conversation about the environmental impact of the Internet. It's
clear that the environmental community is fairly smitten with the
technology, as an organizing tool and as a tool to sell 'green' things
from T-shirts to toilet paper."
If there is one single message for environmentally conscious online
shoppers, it's this: Don't wait until the last minute to do your
Christmas shopping -- if not just to save your sanity, then to help
save the energy sure to be consumed in all those "next day" FedEx and
UPS orgies. "People need to know that all these little choices add
up," says Rejeski. "Most people don't think about that, and most sites
aren't telling people."
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About the writer
Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior writer for Salon Technology.
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