Climate Action Day 47 – Slow Down Your Shipping

Shopping and Consumer Choices

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

Continuing our discussion of e-commerce from Day 46 let’s consider the wisdom of drones delivering our packages. Seriously. It is easy to dismiss that potential future out of hand, but the issue lies with the last mile. Companies can plan for and control the emissions for the shipment of goods from sources to distribution warehouses, but getting the packages to individual homes is usually has the biggest impact on the carbon footprint of a given transaction.

Organized and implemented well, routine drone delivery is not a bad option, short of using a fleet of bicycle couriers (easier to do in dense population centers). According to research from Carnegie-Mellon, for smaller packages with high relative value, drones are a legitimate energy efficiency choice, with only e-cargo bicycles as a better alternative (for small package delivery).

For your current e-commerce habits, you can positively impact the last-mile emissions of your purchases by adopting important habits. The most important is choosing the timing of your deliveries. The short delivery options (one-day to one-hour) constrain the delivery companies in such a way that they trade off energy efficiency and thus emissions to meet the consumer-imposed deadline. Short delivery windows can result in as much as a 180% increase in emissions associated with the delivery.

Heidi suggests several habits to adopt, depending on where e-commerce fits in your daily life. These include:

• Use the “auto-ship” function for recurring purchases of staple goods that you use routinely. This give full autonomy to the shipper to optimize the delivery to reduce their cost and emissions.
• Be thoughtful and explore slower and combined shipping options.
• Resist the urge to buy more than what you need from an online retailer if you are not sure exactly what you want (relying on returns, which amplify the emissions). This is especially true for clothing and shoes, which may better be purchased in a brick and mortar store.
• As always, choose your companies with a little research so that they align with your values. Many retailers are not interested in sustainability and will not do what it takes to reduce the climate impact of your purchases.

“With a little planning and forethought, we can save money and reduce the climate impact of our online purchases”

Heid Roop

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 48: Keep Your Devices Longer and Dispose of Them Properly

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