The Environmental Cost of Amazon’s Two Day Shipping
In the age of consumerism and rapidly advancing technology, we are seeing an immense increase in online shopping. With the growing popularity of platforms like Amazon that provide a vast array of products that can be delivered at your doorstep in one to two days for free, the question of its environmental impact has come into play. So is opting for high-speed shipping really more costly to our environment than just driving yourself to purchase the same product at a local store?
In many cases, online shopping can actually have a smaller carbon-footprint, because those products that are being delivered to your door by trucks have to be deliver to stores just the same. However, environmental problems come when we opt for speed. By choosing two day shipping instead of 5–7 day shipping, companies are no longer able to consolidate their deliveries into more environmentally efficient bundles of goods. Fast shipping puts more vehicles on the road, and these vehicles tend to be delivery trucks, which still largely depend on diesel for fuel and produce larger amount of air pollutants.
So how can we make our guilty- pleasure of online shopping cleaner and more environmentally friendly? There is an incredibly basic solution- choose slower shipping. With a longer period of time between our orders and delivery time, companies have a better chance of consolidating their orders and sending less trucks out onto the road. Similarly, for companies and producers, by providing more incentives to slower shipping options or even alerting their customers of the environmental costs fast-shipping has, they can save money and make online shopping greener for everyone!
