Online shopping is convenient and trendy. But what about the greenhouse gas balance of shopping over the Internet compared to traditional shop visits? A team of researchers has now examined this in more detail using the example of consumer goods such as cosmetics or cleaning agents. Your result: It depends on the type of online trading. Because the delivery service of shops does even better than classic shopping, but pure online trading is worse.
Online trade is enjoying increasing popularity – in addition to shoes, clothing or books, people are increasingly being supplied with everyday consumer goods such as cosmetics, cleaning agents and even food. So far, the share of these goods in online trade is still well below ten percent, but forecasts see an increase by up to 2025 to up to 15 percent.
Delivery service, online trade or shopping yourself?
Sadegh Shahmohammadi from Radboud University in the Netherlands and his colleagues have now investigated how this could affect the environment. They compared the greenhouse gas balances of three sales channels for cosmetics and the like: traditional in-store shopping, purely online trading with delivery via parcel services and the “brick and click” model – the delivery service for established businesses. For their calculations of the CO2 footprint, they included, among other things, how much CO2 is generated by the delivery of the product from the factory to the wholesaler or central warehouse, by storage and packaging as well as the “last mile” – the transport from the store or distribution center to the customer.
The analyzes showed that in countries like Great Britain, shopping in stores is by no means the most environmentally friendly. “The total greenhouse gas footprint for shop purchases is higher than that of shop-based delivery services, but in 81 percent of cases it is significantly lower than online shopping alone,” the researchers report. Specifically, they determined that pure online trading generated twice the carbon footprint as traditional shopping and two to five times larger than the delivery service. For all trade routes, the largest part of the CO2 emissions are the transports from the factory to the distribution centers or dealers as well as the “last mile” to the customer, as Shahmohammadi and his colleagues explain.
The “last mile” does it
One factor that has a major impact on the carbon footprint is the amount of goods purchased: the fewer products I order or buy, the more unfavorable the carbon footprint. In the online trade there are also returns, which also require additional journeys, as the researchers explain. Another factor is the “last mile”: if a buyer travels to the store in his or her own car, their purchase causes significantly more greenhouse gases per product than a combined delivery. The share of the “last mile” in the total CO2 footprint of a product therefore varies greatly depending on traffic habits and country. In China, where most people shop on foot or by bike, this is only 0.03 kilograms of CO2 equivalent, in the USA, on the other hand, with 0.53 kg of CO2 equivalents.
But that also means that when it comes to classic shopping, it is up to us how climate-friendly our shopping is. If we leave the car behind and ride a bike or run to the store, we can reduce the carbon footprint of our shopping by 40 percent, as the researchers explain. In the case of purely online trading, on the other hand, the replacement of delivery vans with electric variants or cargo e-bikes for urban delivery tours could reduce the CO2 footprint by around 26 percent.
Source: American Chemical Society; Technical article: Environmental Science & Technology, doi: 10.1021 / acs.est.9b06252