The Cost of Free Delivery
E-Commerce Taking a Toll on Disadvantaged Communities
By Blake Boucher
Laying on your couch at the end of the day, you suddenly realize you’re out of shampoo and milk. How’s your morning going to go like that? Too tired to go out to the local market, you make the easy decision to order the items on Amazon Prime! Free delivery and the goods will be there before you wake up in the morning.
Sound familiar? Of course, we’ve all done it. But, admit it, you’ve also thought to yourself— is this too good to be true? It is, though you may be shielded from bearing the brunt of the costs if you are not living in one of the areas directly impacted by our delivered-to-your-door, e-commerce culture.
The most signifcant human cost comes in the form of 100+ days of bad air a year for those living in the Inland Empire, our regional e-commerce hub, where many of the distribution centers for the goods we conveniently order online are located. This bad air can result in life-altering health issues. For example, the number of sick days per year taken by school children in the Inland Empire — where the eastern edge of Los Angeles County abuts San Bernardino and Riverside counties — has increased with the rise of e-commerce distribution centers. The number of sick days for children outpaces richer communities in West Los Angeles and South Orange County.
When we order something from Amazon, the product takes a complicated, back-and-forth path to your doorstep and each leg of the journey adds to the air pollution that hits working-class neighborhoods the hardest. It happens like this: a product arrives from China to our massive Port Complex — usually onboard massive, diesel-fueled container ships. Then it’s transported to Los Angeles in those large containers via train or semi-trucks, most running on particulate-heavy diesel fuel. There, the goods are sorted and sent again on trucks to warehouses and fulfillment centers that litter the Inland Empire, where the land and commercial real estate needed for these giant facilities is more available and cheaper. When a consumer orders a product, that item gets put back on a truck for delivery directly to the consumer, often retracing the polluting path the product took in the first place.
The toxic diesel fumes this process releases into our air get backed up by the steep San Gabriel Mountains, where it hovers over the Inland Empire, resulting in many days of poor air quality for residents. Things might get worse before they get better as the e-commerce industry is the fastest growing in the world.
Air pollution is responsible for approximately 1,600 premature deaths per year in the South Coast Air Basin.
Air Pollution contributes to asthma and lung damage, respiratory and cardiac diseases, cancer, birth defects, premature death, and other health issues. In 2021 article published in the Orange County Register, Dr. Afif El-Hasan, a pediatrician and spokesperson for the American Lung Association, noted the risks air pollution poses for kids, including inflammation of breathing airways and ability to fight off infections. This short-term effect can lead to frequent cases of respiratory illnesses and the development of asthma. The long-term effects include increased risks of heart disease, cancer, emphysema, and other severe health conditions.
The South Coast Air Quality Management Districts is responsible for monitoring and managing the air quality in Southern California. Lisa Tanaka O’Malley, assistant deputy executive officer for the SCAQMD, said that the South Coast Air Basin, is home to nearly 17 million people who “are breathing some of the unhealthiest air in the nation.” She added that it is “home to approximately two-thirds of the state’s environmental justice communities — neighborhoods that are disproportionately impacted by air pollution, including emissions related to the Southern California goods movement and logistics complex.” This region covers all of Orange County, non-desert regions of Los Angeles County, and Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
O’Malley said that air pollution “is responsible for approximately 1,600 premature deaths per year that occur in the South Coast Air Basin.” According to the AQMD’s website, the region had exceeded the federal eight-hour ozone standard levels for healthy air on 124 days during 2022. The maximum levels on some days were twice as high as the federal standard for clean air.
The Inland Empire is the location of many communities that are disproportionately impacted by air pollution, especially as a result of e-commerce. That free delivery we have all gotten used to contributes to the Inland Empire being known as “America’s shopping cart” and cities such as Fontana and Ontario being located in what have been labeled as “diesel death zones”. According to “The Inland Empire’s Growing Pains”, the Ontario area has a 97.26 toxic percentile — meaning the air quality is more toxic than 97.26 percent of the census tracts in California. The most adversely affected are disproportionately of the Latino and Black communities.
Once farmland, the Inland Empire has become a landscape of thousands of warehouses serving our e-commerce addiction. Jim Newton of Cal Matters stated that the numbers of warehouses in the Inland Empire increased from 234 in 1980 to over 4,000 today. These warehouses take up around one billion square feet of the Inland Empire, with more than 300 warehouses operating less than 1,000 feet from schools. Nearly 300 additional projects have been approved for construction in these primarily working-class, job-hungry neighborhoods. The question remains, can we have our door-delivery shampoo and milk and breathable air at the same time? The answer lies in how fast we can build the infrastructure needed for zero-emissions logistics and transportation operations.
Amazon’s partnership with electric-truck manufacturer Rivian is to provide the logistics giant with 100,000 electric delivery vans by 2030, which is a step in the right direction. Amazon’s Rivian fleet is already being rolled out and Amazon is investing in expensive infrastructure needed to support electric-vehicle deliveries. While this is, no doubt, an improvement over current conditions, SCAQMD’s Lisa Tanaka O’Malley noted that the largest source of air pollution in the region comes from getting the goods to the fulfillment centers via ocean-going vessels, aircraft, train, and heavy trucks.
“Transitioning last-mile freight delivery to zero-emissions is one action to help reduce air pollution, but reductions of emissions are needed from the heavy-duty mobile sources,” said O’Malley.
In other words, improvements need to be made up and down the system, from source to doorstep.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District, in their Annual Clean Fuels Reports, discussed the wide range of research and future plans to make such systemic changes. Currently, funding and incentive programs are in place for a variety of companies to innovate technologies in advancement with automobiles, transit buses, medium and heavy-duty trucks, and off-roading equipment. The SCAQMD has 74 Clean Fuels Fund contracts in the works as of January 1, 2023.
As you can see in the figure above, 70 percent of the funding is being spent on the innovation of the Electric / Hybrid Technology & Infrastructure sector. This includes contracts with Volvo Group, the University of California Riverside, Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, Daimler Trucks North America LLC, and NFI Interactive Logistic LLC. A major emphasis, further illustrated in the following chart, is on putting electric vehicle infrastructure into place.
With current technology, the range for EV semi-trucks is over 200 miles for a full charge. The Daimler battery takes two hours to charge with a range of 220 miles, and the Volvo battery takes 1.5 hours to charge with a range of 275 miles. This provides enough range to drive from Los Angeles to the Inland Empire and back to Los Angeles on a full battery. It is hoped that increased EV delivery will reduce the number of bad-air days experienced by disadvantaged communities throughout the South Coast Air Basin and the Inland Empire, which have been trapped in an endless diesel-burning cycle.
While the future may be cleaner, we are not there yet, and we continue to contribute to “diesel-death zones” with every “free delivery” from Amazon. There are life-long illnesses correlated through the polluted air that the E-Commerce world has contributed too. Even as we build towards reducing emissions, we can all think twice before ordering something for the free delivery.
