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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 li

by bjoernw 16y ago

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.

potatolicious 16y ago
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.
- Robin_Message 16y ago
  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.
  - derobert 16y ago
    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...]
baddox 16y ago
How did that toothpaste get to the store?
- bjoernw 16y ago
  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.
  - megablast 16y ago
    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.
    - baddox 16y ago
      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.
  - potatolicious 16y ago
    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.
Turing_Machine 16y ago
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. The individual packaging is another story.
ippisl 16y ago
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.

by bjoernw 16y ago

potatolicious 16y ago

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.

Robin_Message 16y ago
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.
- derobert 16y ago
  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...]

baddox 16y ago

How did that toothpaste get to the store?

bjoernw 16y ago
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.
- megablast 16y ago
  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.
  - baddox 16y ago
    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.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  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.

Turing_Machine 16y ago

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. The individual packaging is another story.

ippisl 16y ago

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.