Think about the environmental impact of having toothpaste shipped to your house on a UPS truck vs. picking one up at the store while doing your groceries.
I like the idea of Amazon Prime but I would feel bad just ordering some paper towels or toothpaste because I can.
The whole concept of online shopping gets greener as it grows - most people live driving distance away from the stores they regularly visit. The difference is between a tightly packed, highly route and fuel-optimized delivery system... or everyone's single-occupancy vehicle on the road zipping between strip malls.
It's wasteful if the UPS truck isn't being sufficiently utilized, it's downright awesome if it is.
So your point is that strip malls and car dependency are bad, right? But that doesn't mean that trucking a tube of toothpaste to my house is good.
FWIW, I cycle to the store, so until Amazon has a distribution hub in my town and cycle couriers for delivery, they're not going to be more fuel-efficient.
You need to consider the amount of fuel used to produce the calories you consume cycling, which may be more or less than UPS, depending on how much additional driving UPS has to do to deliver (it may be fairly small e.g., if they're already in your neighborhood for another delivery).
[Of course, cycling has health benefits too, but if we're just considering fuel...]
It gets transported in bulk in containers that maximize the amount that can be transported on a truck. I think it's fair to say that the amount of gas used per bottle of toothpaste is probably less when transported in bulk.
Not sure about all the downvotes, I'm just trying to discuss possible negative effects. I usually just downvote when something is off-topic or someone is being a troll.
But it is transported in bulk. It's not as if we're sending along semi-trailers loaded with a single tube of toothpaste - those things are packed to the brim with what other people have ordered.
The way I look at it is this: with a brick and mortar store you only have the efficient, bulk transport all the way up until the retail endpoint. Everything after that is somewhere between ludicrously wasteful, and terrifyingly wasteful. Even then, we can fulfill entire cities from a single (or very few) warehouses in an online shopping context, but retail stores require many more locations, each carrying a smaller amount of stock (much of which will remain unsold to be returned elsewhere), and situated according to the whims of the consumer, not the efficiency of distribution.
You driving to the store for your toothpaste may seem like a negligible amount of pollution contribution - but multiply that by everyone in your entire city, and suddenly hauling a fleet of semi trailers would seem downright clean in comparison.
With online shopping the shipping process remains bulk from the supplier all the way to your door - there is no SUV with a single passenger hauling 3 bags of groceries - that UPS truck is packed to the brim and has a highly optimized route. Not to mention, with consolidated inventories, overstock (and thus more transportation and garbage waste) is greatly reduced and you don't have the added transportation layer of distribution center -> retail store.
> You driving to the store for your toothpaste may seem like a negligible amount of pollution contribution - but multiply that by everyone in your entire city, and suddenly hauling a fleet of semi trailers would seem downright clean in comparison.
But I don't drive to the store. I cycle. Ever seen a UPS guy on a bike, delivering everyone's Amazon orders?
> there is no SUV with a single passenger hauling 3 bags of groceries
People doing that are, frankly, tossers. If you start from A and say "B is a great optimisation compared to A," then you are missing C,D and E, all of which are better.
As a practical thing Amazon could do, how about slipping a tube of toothpaste in with your regular books order, a few days before you would otherwise have ordered a new tube?
> But I don't drive to the store. I cycle. Ever seen a UPS guy on a bike, delivering everyone's Amazon orders?
How many of you are out there in the USA? Honestly, not many. The vast majority of Americans drive to get their groceries and get their shopping done. I hate to say it - but you're a relatively rare edge case.
There's also the unsolved problem of overstock - and the smaller the store (physically) the worse it gets. In order to maintain selection, brick and mortar stores must stock a large range of items, many of which sell poorly. Maybe in your entire city 5 units would get sold in a given month - but if there are 30 stores in the city, each one would now have to hang onto a single unit, since you don't know when/where a customer would want it. A great deal of overstock ends up in landfills, and even the stuff that does not, it requires further transportation to consolidate, and then even more transportation to liquidate.
For an online store, since a single facility serves a much larger number of customers, overstock is improved by leaps and bounds (orders of magnitude, really). This results in less garbage waste due to not having to stock a lot of stuff that isn't expected to sell, and less transportation cost also.
> how about slipping a tube of toothpaste in with your regular books order
I making people think about their environmental impact when they are shopping online is not a popular option here.
If you live in a big city, and travel to work, you would have ample opportunity to buy stuff on the way and back. This is what I do, but then I bike and actually give a shit about stuff like this.
Every living creature on Earth makes an environmental impact. I'm not against activism, but I recognize that environmentalism is simply about drawing the line somewhere—it's unrealistic to expect humanity or individuals to have no environmental impact. An argument saying "buying your toothpaste from Amazon is bad for the environment" may be true, but I can one-up you by saying "killings flowers to clean your teeth with is bad for the environment." It's not about "environment haters" vs. "environmentalists," it's about where you draw the line.
Yes , ordering that toothpaste alone is more energy wasteful , but:
1.amazon has a really strong incentive to prevent too many "single toothpaste" scenarios.
2.e-commerce delivery (from warehouse to home) takes 1/3 of the gas of driving to the store , and it's much more practical and realistic to convert a fleet of UPS trucks into clean energy , than household cars.
If this grows big, this looks like a thing that can be part of the lives of the whole population(not only environmentalists like us) and be a serious part in the fight for global warming.
I'd bet that the UPS truck works out to be more fuel-efficient than doing it in a private automobile, actually. The UPS truck is carrying the stuff for a whole neighborhood (or at least general vicinity). That's gotta be more efficient than dozens of individual trips each carrying a small load.
I like the idea of Amazon Prime but I would feel bad just ordering some paper towels or toothpaste because I can.