VANCOUVER—Think twice before you click “proceed to checkout” in a rush to take advantage of the widespread deals coming online Friday.
Those savings could come at a steep environmental cost. As online shopping continues to grow in popularity, the consequences for waste management and transportation-related emissions are becoming more serious.
Both are already significant environmental challenges across the country. Transportation accounts for about a quarter of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, and millions of tonnes of garbage wind up in landfills each year.
The question is whether increasing e-commerce can be part of the solution or only the problem, especially with people turning to online shopping en masse.
A survey of 5,000 Canadian online shoppers, conducted in March 2016 for Canada Post, found that one in four respondents spent more online than they did in store the year before.
Most online shoppers (48 per cent) were based in urban areas, with 31 per cent based in the suburbs and 20 per cent in rural areas or small towns.
Online shopping is driven by convenience and the opportunity to compare products and prices “without the hassle of pushing through crowds at stores,” the survey report says.
For Sam Copeland, a 24-year-old software engineer who works at a finance company in Vancouver, Amazon is almost unmatched for its convenience. He orders about twice a month. It could be cans of soup, cookies, oatmeal, toiletries — you name it, Amazon has it.
Copeland lives in North Vancouver and commutes by bus across Burrard Inlet to work in downtown Vancouver every day. He doesn’t own a car. He’s also completing a master’s degree in computational finance through the University of Washington part-time.
While the packaging — he said it’s often a lot — lingers at the back of his mind, his busy lifestyle makes the convenience of online shopping pretty attractive.
He used the online service much less often when he lived next door to a grocery store and down the road from a pharmacy in Kitsilano, a Vancouver neighbourhood southeast of downtown.
Now, he said, “I don’t really want to come home and then get on the bus to go to the store and buy toothpaste. I can order it and have it come two days later. Perfect.”
But online shopping, particularly through e-commerce giant Amazon, has taken considerable heat over the years for wasteful packaging.
While the company says it has come a long way, it’s still not unusual for goods purchased online to come wrapped in plastic air pillows and packed in unnecessarily large cardboard boxes. Those may be recyclable, but even in Metro Vancouver, a hotbed of environmentalism, more than 14,000 tonnes of cardboard were dumped in the trash — not the recycling bin — in 2016, according to that year’s waste composition monitoring report.
A spokesperson for Amazon, Kaan Yalkin, said in a statement that the company has a global team working to reduce packaging waste and increase the use of recyclable materials. Over the past decade, the company has eliminated more than 221,000 tonnes of packaging through various initiatives, he said.
Other companies, including the clothing store Toad&Co, are working to reduce single-use packaging altogether, offering to ship products in a reusable mailer that can be shipped back to the store.
Aside from packaging, the rise of expedited and in some cases same-day delivery raises its own set of concerns, particularly amid the devastating wildfires, floods and extreme weather events worsened by climate change.
Anne Goodchild, a transportation engineer and founding director of the University of Washington’s Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center, has studied the impact of online shopping on travel behaviour. How it affects pollution depends on a variety of local factors.
But delivery services do have the potential to be a “significant benefit environmentally,” Goodchild said. It’s like a bus for goods.
Delivery services tend to be well organized, consolidating many deliveries into a single vehicle. Cities use a similar model for services such as garbage collection.
“It’s more efficient to have one person come around and pick up everybody’s stuff, and that’s obvious to us,” Goodchild said.
That’s the “utopian” view: “A very efficient, very consolidated, centralized distribution system that’s like a transit system for goods.”
In this scenario, having goods delivered could reduce pollution from that “last mile” of the distribution system, Goodchild said.
But that’s the best-case scenario. When online shoppers demand their products be delivered as quickly as possible, the opportunities for efficiency go right out the window, along with the environmental benefits.
Even in the best-case scenario, there’s a catch or two.
Using delivery services can reduce emissions such as CO2, which contribute to climate change no matter where they are produced. But other contaminants released by delivery vehicles, which tend to be diesel, can cause health problems locally.
The second problem is that the environmental benefits of delivery services really depend on whether it’s offsetting personal car use, said Alex Bigazzi, an assistant professor in both the department of Civil Engineering and the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia.
In cities where people tend to walk, bike or take transit, you would expect to see fewer benefits from online shopping and possibly an increase in local greenhouse gas emissions, he said. In more sprawling areas where people use personal cars for the vast majority of their trips, there’s more potential for environmental gains.
Goodchild agreed, explaining the net impact of delivery in a region depends on the details: the distance a package has to travel from the warehouse, how quickly a shopper is asking for it to be delivered and whether that shopper uses their car for another activity with the time they saved by shopping online.
In a statement, Yalkin said: “Amazon is committed to minimizing our carbon emissions by optimizing our transportation network, improving product packaging to drive efficiency in the distribution of products, implementing energy efficiency measures in our operations and using renewable energy to run our business.”
The company has made improvements to its own fleet of delivery vehicles to improve their fuel efficiency, he added. These measures include installing automatic tire-inflation systems that keep tires properly inflated and maximize fuel efficiency.
It’s also signed the “Sustainable Fuel Buyers’ Principles,” which among other things aim to help increase demand for low-carbon fuels.
But there’s more to be done to reduce the emissions impact of online shopping, Goodchild said. Individual shoppers have a role to play, too.
Here’s how to reduce the environmental impact of shopping online:
- Goodchild suggests keeping a shopping list, so you can make one bulk order instead of several. Often, she added, Amazon has an option to consolidate the shipment so your purchases are delivered in one trip when they’re all ready. Choose that option whenever possible, she suggested.
- Both Goodchild and Bigazzi said shoppers should resist the urge to ask for expedited shipping if it’s not really needed. A longer lead time means delivery services can plan the most efficient deliveries.
- Jo-Anne St. Godard, the executive director of the Recycling Council of Ontario, warned shoppers not to get caught up in the hype of Black Friday, regardless of whether they shop online or in-store. “Less is really more,” she said. “I think that’s the No. 1 way of keeping everybody’s waste down.”
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Ainslie Cruickshank is a Vancouver-based reporter covering the environment. Follow her on Twitter: @ainscruickshank