How to Shop Online More Sustainably

A couple of days before I started reporting this story, I ordered a cat scratcher from Amazon. When it arrived, I immediately felt guilty. The scratcher was made entirely of cardboard. It came inside its own cardboard mailing box. And that box had been stuck inside another, much larger cardboard box and surrounded by bubble wrap. All of that, just to deliver intact something whose sole purpose is to be destroyed. I had to wonder: Did the way I acquired it help destroy the planet, too?

As I’ve since learned, the consensus among independent researchers is that online shopping can in fact be much less damaging to the environment than traditional, in-store shopping—but only if we do it the right way.

To my relief, cardboard and bubble wrap are not a major part of the problem. Sadegh Shahmohammadi, a sustainable-logistics expert at The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, and his colleagues have made detailed models of the carbon footprint of various methods of shopping. And Shahmohammadi said packaging isn’t a big contributor: “It’s not minor, but it’s not significant.” (Additionally, cardboard and much of the bubble wrap now used are recyclable.)

Rather, Shahmohammadi explained, the carbon footprint of shopping itself—online or in-store—is the chief culprit, due to emissions from delivery trucks and personal vehicles. Thankfully, we can minimize those emissions by making a few simple changes to our shopping behavior.

Online shopping can actually be greener than traditional retail

Buying goods online can be better for the environment than in-store shopping for one fundamental reason: With online shopping, a single truck or van can replace multiple car trips, by multiple households, to stores. It helps to think of it this way: In most of the United States, almost every purchase means putting a vehicle on the road—either your own or a delivery company’s. (Shahmohammadi told me that “in the US, almost 95% of the shopping is by car.”) If you give online retailers enough time to fully load, or consolidate, their trucks before they go on their delivery runs, the result is a significant overall drop in greenhouse-gas emissions compared with in-store shopping: One van delivering 50 packages is much more efficient than 50 people driving to the store.

“E-commerce is not the evil, I don’t think,” Miguel Jaller, associate professor of civil engineering at UC Davis and co-director of the school’s Sustainable Freight Research Center, told me. “The evil comes from the abuse of e-commerce, because it’s so convenient that we are abusing this opportunity to have a really nice and eco-friendly option that consolidates cargo.” (In Jaller’s model of US commerce, shopping exclusively online is about 87% more efficient than doing all of your shopping in-store, in terms of CO₂ emissions and vehicle-miles traveled.)

One van delivering 50 packages is much more efficient than 50 people driving to the store.

But that potential efficiency lies in tension with shoppers’ fatal attraction to e-commerce’s rapid delivery. When we choose same-day or next-day delivery, we alter the efficiency equation. Josué Velázquez Martínez, director of the Sustainable Logistics Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described the impact: “When you add the challenge of fast shipping, then you cannot get the benefit of consolidation. You are actually obliged to go multiple times, on multiple days, to the same location.” He said the delivery vehicles can go from 80% full to just 10% or 20%—a “really substantial” drop that can completely erode the emissions benefits of online shopping.

There’s a second, subtler way that our shopping behavior can reduce e-commerce’s potential to be better for the environment. When we use it to supplement (rather than substitute for) our in-store shopping, we essentially turn one shopping trip into two. Buying half of your groceries online and driving to a store for the other half, for example, means you’ve put two vehicles on the road when one would have sufficed. “If you do both, there’s no reduction—you add, actually, to your [carbon] footprint,” said Patricia van Loon, assistant professor of supply and operations management at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology. In a similar vein, she added, “You see this very often with expensive items, and fashion: that you first go to the shop to look—a browsing trip, we call it—and then you buy online because it’s cheaper there. There’s no benefit to that from a CO₂ perspective.”

How e-tailers can improve

“Whenever I speak to companies, they say, ‘It’s so important to deliver fast,’” van Loon told me later in our conversation. “And when I speak to customers, they say, ‘Well, I want to be more environmentally friendly, and I don’t care if it is same-day, and very often I don’t need it. I just want to know when it will arrive.’”

The fact that corporations prioritize customer satisfaction is nothing new or surprising, but it was striking to me (and to van Loon) that such a gulf could exist between what e-tailers think customers want and what they actually do want.

Yet Velázquez and his students have found evidence that the gulf is real. They created what they call the Green Button Project for a major retailer in Mexico. When a shopper clicked the buy button, they were shown one of several different questions. For example, one question asked whether they would accept slower shipping if it meant lower CO₂ emissions; another, whether a shopper would accept slower shipping if it saved the equivalent of a certain number of trees. (The tree figure was calculated as the number of trees it would take to capture the amount of CO₂ generated by fast shipping, Velázquez said.)

The company’s belief, Velázquez said, was that shoppers “wouldn’t care—everybody wants everything fast now.” Yet when shown the tree option, 71% of shoppers agreed to the slower shipping. And that was true across all demographic groups, not just those known to prioritize environmental concerns. “The other ways we’ve been trying to communicate environmental impacts, like providing kilograms of CO₂ or other ways to communicate this with chemical information, are actually not useful for the consumer,” Velázquez said, “but once you provide something that is meaningful to them, like number of trees, consumers are willing to do it. People are really excited.”

Unfortunately, a clearly labeled, environmentally friendly shipping opt-in is not a practice that’s been widely adopted, Velázquez added. “It would be fantastic to see Amazon or Walmart or any other monster of e-commerce actually measure the transport emissions, get the estimates of the impacts of fast shipping online or shopping in-store, and then display this information to consumers so they can make an educated decision.”

One economic reward that does already exist for e-tailers and delivery companies is a shift to electric delivery vehicles. “The last-mile delivery is actually a fairly easy usage to electrify,” Samantha Gross, director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution, told me. “It also has monetary advantages. The vehicles are used really heavily—on the road every day, running around all day—and electricity is a cheaper fuel than gasoline or diesel. Those vehicles are likely to be more expensive up front, but they’re also likely to pay for themselves.” She added that as the US grid becomes cleaner, via renewable sources like wind and solar, the ecological benefits will compound.

And some companies are already taking advantage of the economic reward. Amazon has ordered 100,000 custom-designed electric delivery vans from Rivian (in which it is also a major investor). The first ones are already making deliveries in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and Amazon intends to bring them to 14 more US cities this year. UPS has ordered 10,000 electric delivery vehicles from UK-based Arrival, which is opening a North Carolina facility to manufacture them.

How shoppers can make an impact

The good news is that anyone can improve their own impact when shopping online. Every expert I spoke with said that to make your purchases more environmentally friendly, you need to do three things:

Group your purchases

Since every online purchase puts a delivery vehicle on the road, it’s best to order multiple things at the same time. Retailers can often pack all of the items into a single box (or at least get all the stuff into the same truck or van), so then you’ve done all of your shopping in a single “trip.” Ordering piecemeal, one or two items at a time, eliminates that efficiency, because each order adds another delivery trip.

Choose slower delivery options

When you select a slower delivery option, you allow e-tailers to maximize their efficiency by consolidating orders, and you minimize the impact of your in-store shopping. Choosing a slower delivery option, such as setting an Amazon Day, does not necessarily mean you won’t get your package faster. (Amazon Day is a service available to Prime members that dedicates a single day of the week for delivery of all your orders; just type “Amazon Day” into the site’s search bar.) If what you ordered is in a local warehouse, it may be most efficient for the retailer to get the item onto the next truck that serves your neighborhood. You’re giving the retailer room to choose the most efficient delivery, rather than forcing it to pick the fastest.

But many retailers are offering ultra-fast delivery options in an effort to attract more customers, and those options make consolidation impossible. “It’s the one-hour or two-hour deliveries that make the system break,” Jaller said. So try to avoid them.

Use online shopping to replace—not supplement—in-store buying

It always helps to think of your shopping as involving a vehicle—yours or the delivery company’s. So to minimize the total environmental impact, try not to use online ordering for goods that you already buy in a physical store. “If you’re comparing it to the traditional way of shopping—that people were going to stores and doing these kind of longer, almost individual trips to the store—a lot of the driving distance and energy comes from that shopping activity,” said Jaller. “If we are able to substitute some of that with consolidated commercial delivery, we get a gain. But if we are still going to stores and also ordering some stuff, then you are just adding to the system.”

You might have additional ways of making your shopping more environmentally friendly. If you can walk, bike, or take public transport for your in-store shopping, that’s lower-impact than ordering the same products online, and it’s vastly better than driving to the store. Similarly, if you can use those low-impact options to pick up Amazon orders at an Amazon Locker (if there’s one nearby), that’s better than having stuff delivered to your door. “The delivery routes become more efficient,” van Loon said. She added that drop boxes also eliminate the problem of failed deliveries (if a customer isn’t home to sign for the package and a second delivery trip has to be made).

At least I was home for the first attempt at delivering my piece-of-cardboard-inside-more-cardboard-bubble-wrapped-inside-yet-more-cardboard. And I’d also chosen Amazon Day delivery. But still, the cat scratcher is staring accusingly at me from across the room. Why, it seems to ask, did I not just walk the three blocks to our local pet store to buy one? Why did I put a truck on the road? I can’t answer. For whatever reason, those questions just didn’t occur to me at the time. But they’re the sort of questions I’ll be asking of all my online purchases going forward.

Sources

1. Miguel Jaller, associate professor and co-director, Sustainable Freight Research Center, University of California Davis, phone interview, March 10, 2021

2. Patricia van Loon, assistant professor of supply and operations management, Chalmers University of Technology, Zoom interview, March 16, 2021

3. Josué Velázquez Martínez, director, Sustainable Logistics Initiative, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, phone interview, March 16, 2020

4. Sadegh Shahmohammadi, data scientist (circular economy), The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), phone interview, March 12, 2021

5. Samantha Gross, director, Energy Security and Climate Initiative, The Brookings Institution, Zoom interview, March 22, 2021

6. Patricia van Loon, et al., A comparative analysis of carbon emissions from online retailing of fast moving consumer goods, Journal of Cleaner Production, 2015

7. Miguel Jaller and Anmol Pahwa, Evaluating the environmental impacts of online shopping: A behavioral and transportation approach, Transportation Research Part D, 2020

8. Sadegh Shahmohammadi, et al., Comparative Greenhouse Gas Footprinting of Online versus Traditional Shopping for Fast-Moving Consumer Goods: A Stochastic Approach, Environmental Science & Technology, 2020

9. Samantha Gross, The challenge of decarbonizing heavy transport, The Brookings Institution, October 2020