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Unstated major premise: Buying electric vans is a step in the right direction in the first place. I'm thinking here of the lessons we've been learning recently
by mumblemumble 7y ago
Unstated major premise: Buying electric vans is a step in the right direction in the first place.
I'm thinking here of the lessons we've been learning recently about recycling: It would appear that we now need to come to terms with the possibility that recycling has done far more harm than good, by making it easier to justify excessive packaging waste while at the same time mostly only giving consumers the impression that what they put in the recycle bin wasn't going to waste.
I could see something similar happening with electric delivery vans: Perhaps, by ostensibly greening the most consumer-visible part of the process, they can make them feel better about buying into a way of getting their consumer products that relies on a much less efficient supply chain than the one used by the system it's supplanting.
Perhaps, if we dig into it, we'll discover that Amazon is being pennywise here, because properly dealing with the pounds would require rolling back the "free 2 day shipping of pretty much anything to pretty much anywhere" guarantee that underlies so much of Amazon's current business model.
- noonespecial 7y agoIt's possible. But even if that part is true, the large investment might spur faster growth in electrification which might then be good enough to outweigh that initial downside. Unintended consequences are hard. I'm just getting a little fatigued with the fearful "don't do anything, it might make it worse" coupled with the "stop all the everything" approach to environmentalism that seems to becoming ever more dominant. I just don't think that's going to work. Doing nothing won't help, and convincing people to do without doesn't work, so ?
- mumblemumble 7y agoI wasn't really going for "don't do anything, it might make it worse" so much as calling attention to what I suspect is an act of greenwashing. As far as convincing people to do without goes, IMO the root cause of the problem is consumerism, and anything that fails to contend directly with that is bikeshedding.
- derekp7 7y agoHow would increasing the delivery time reduce the amount of gas it takes to get an item to my doorstep? Considering that the items ship from a warehouse about 15 miles from my house. I suppose that if an occasional item ships from across the country, then it would be less impactful to go by truck for 5 days, so if that is the case then any item that falls under that category could have a selection item on the checkout screen that says "Delay shipment by 3 days, to save 3 lbs of greenhouse gasses". That may influence consumer behavior. BTW, what is the greenhouse gas emissions difference between one delivery vehicle making the rounds, vs several hundred people each driving to a store to buy something?
- Symmetry 7y agoYes, this is all about speed/efficiency tradeoffs in long haul shipping between rail, highway, and flight. It's hard to say what fraction of Amazon orders aren't stored in delivery distance of your house but it's probably most of them.
- organsnyder 7y agoBatching deliveries could result in massive energy savings. Right now, Amazon's vans tend to hop around neighborhoods (at least that's what their delivery tracker shows me). If deliveries were batched, the delivery density would be much higher, reducing the distance a single vehicle would have to travel to empty a full load of packages.
- djaychela 7y agoAbsolutely - imagine if there was a system where you had one delivery a week which consisted of all the items from all the shopping you'd done, instead of piecemeal deliveries throughout the week. The savings could be immense, but I can't imagine such a system being popular.
- rrix2 7y agoAmazon provides this already: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17928921011 https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=17928921011