Online Shopping May Actually Increase Pollution

destinyland writes "British researchers have reached a startling conclusion. Unless online shoppers order 25 items at a time, they're polluting more than if they shopped at their local mall. An environmental benefit only occurs 'if online shopping replaces 3.5 traditional shopping trips, or if 25 orders are delivered at the same time, or, if the distance traveled to where the purchase is made is more than 50 kilometers. Shopping online does not offer net environmental benefits unless these criteria are met.' The study was conducted by Newcastle University's Institution of Engineering and Technology, which blames the environmental impact of transportation, warning that 'policy makers must do their homework to ensure that rebound effects do not negate the positive benefits of their policy initiatives.' But one technology site notes the study was conducted in Britain, which could have an impact on its conclusions."

Comments

*thwack!*

[ScrewMaster]

But one technology site notes the study was conducted in Britain, which could have an impact on its conclusions."

Ya think, Dinozzo?

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[Pojut]

I believe that's what the old folks call an "I coulda had a V-8" moment...

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[ScrewMaster]

I believe that's what the old folks call an "I coulda had a V-8" moment...

I think it's more akin to House saying, "You're an idiot."

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[Gerzel]

The title of this article seems to imply that this should be a surprise.

Did anyone think that online shopping would be "greener" than traditional?

You can fault the local wallyworld for a lot of things but general inefficiency largely isn't one of them.

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[Dare nMc]

Generally the more efficient way is cheaper, so I figure it should be. I figured that because FedEx/UPS can optimize it's delivery pattern in my neighborhood, it is cheaper for them to pack up all our packages and deliver several families in the same neighborhoods shopping in one trip. After all Walmart has to have all the packages shipped in, then dispersed one car at a time, and online I can shop at hundreds of stores without burning fuel looking around.

Except for the SuperWalmart on my way home from work, online is likely more fuel efficient for me, since direct shopping almost always cost me more in fuel alone than the delivery cost alone, for online.
what is "Green" is way to difficult to even guess at, other than "green" as in the color of money it costs me.

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[muridae]

The problem is, if you shop in a physical store you are more likely to purchase multiple things at once. Even if you drive a few miles between each store, the major part of the drive back is done with a full car. If you purchase online, each package may get shipped separately. The more spaced out they are, the more a driver has to cover the same neighborhood, day after day, and the less 'green' it is. Now, if you are like my mother, and drive 20 miles to the store for one thing then get home and realize you need something else and drive back, and repeat a few times, then it's probably greener to buy online.

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[arivanov]

The same can be said about distribution chains. You can fault the Home Delivery Network or other cheap as in cheaps couriers for a lot of things, but inefficiency is not one of them.

The article referring report is a bit skimpy on the methodology used. I would be interested if it accounts for all the environmental damage from building the mall in the first place as well as its regular refurbishment (most undergo at least some level of redoing every 10 years or so).

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[mrchaotica]

The more spaced out they are, the more a driver has to cover the same neighborhood, day after day, and the less 'green' it is.

On the other hand, once you get past a certain threshold where the delivery driver has to visit the neighborhood daily anyway, all the marginal packages increase efficiency.

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[TheLink]

If efficiency is your goal, you should do it the Foxconn way.

Basically you live, work and eat in the factory-city (some even die there ;) ). The factory-city even has its own chicken farm producing eggs for the factory cafeterias: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_38/b4195058423479_page_3.htm

No need to waste time, space and resources to have the workers go shopping for different stuff, cook their own meals and storing surpluses in their own refrigerators and stores.

Instead of:
farms -> hypermarkets -> shopping commutes -> fridge/store -> kitchen -> consumption point

You have:
farms -> cafeteria fridge/store -> cafeteria kitchen -> consumption point

When done right, this way will be less polluting than the "western suburban method". It may not make for a better lifestyle, but if efficiency is the goal, this is what you do.

FWIW, if you live in a city (normal not factory) that's suitable for pedestrians it might actually not be so inefficient to eat out assuming you go to restaurants that are similar in efficiencies as hypermarkets.

farms -> restaurant fridge/store -> restaurant kitchen -> consumption point.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Then you have places like Flint, Michigan, that literally die after the company decides to delocalize itself leaving out a wasteland made by abandoned buildings.

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[Half-pint HAL]

The article says Optimization for mountain rural communities will be very different than for dense urban areas. but the study did account for this -- hence the mention of 50km. If you live 50km from the shops, you're clearly in a sparsely populated rural community, not a dense urban one.

The only variable that's going to really undo this is if you take your car absolutely everywhere and your car uses too much fuel. IE the results will be the same or even more strongly in favour of physical shopping in every country outside the UK... except the USA.

HAL.

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[queazocotal]

It cites http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0195-9255(02)00025-2 which is a 2002 paper, behind a paywall for Environmental Impact Assessment Review - anyone have a subscription?

The '25 items or less' seems debatable, especially in areas where the delivery vehicle will be delivering to one area with optimised routing.

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[moonbender]

I also reside in communal living quarters, though I usually call them a flat in an apartment building. I don't need a car to buy groceries and I often have the option of buying local stuff -- even though the reduced distance isn't reflected in the price since we're still living in the age of essentially free energy and mobility. Going to the extremes of Chinese migratory worker accommodations is probably not necessary; in fact, I assume that at some point an increase in population density will no longer be benefitial even if you ignore the social downsides.

On a sidenote. Foxconn optimises for "efficiency", but efficiency is a meaningless word unless it's grounded -- you can't be efficient, you can only be efficient with respects to some quantity, ie. time, money, resources. Clearly, the factory city is efficient in terms of money spent by Foxconn (or whoever), but it may not be efficient in terms of money (eventually) spent by other people or overall resources.

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[TheRaven64]

If I buy online from a big store, like Amazon or Tesco, they have a local distribution centre that is about as close to me as the local out-of-town shopping centres (the same place, in the case of Tesco). City centre shops are closer. I walk to them, so there is much less pollution from the last part of the shipping chain, but things need to be delivered right into the middle of town first.

I'm not really sure how they got these numbers. Almost everything that I get delivered from online stores comes via the Royal Mail. Their van is coming past my house every day irrespective of the volume of post. It's difficult to imagine the contrived delivery loads that you'd need in order for the delivery to the local shops to be so much more efficient.

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[Ritchie70]

Well that's the thing then isn't it.

In the US, outside the core of what, perhaps a couple dozen cities at most, most people pretty much do take their car everywhere.

I live in the western Chicago suburbs; I'm more likely to not buy something than I am to walk to the store (or bicycle, I don't even own one) to get it.

If I want what I ordered from Amazon last night, two HDMI cables, a VGA cable, a 1/8-inch audio cable and some poster putty, I'd be hitting at least two stores to get that.

Best Buy is 3 miles away. There's a Walgreens next to it. (I wouldn't really buy that stuff at Best Buy, but they're the closest place I theoretically could. Aside from the VGA I could probably get it all at Walgreens.)

So I'd be driving 6 miles in a fairly new, theoretically at least "PZEV" car that gets about 25 mpg. (And because I would really go to Fry's or MicroCenter to get the stuff, that's more like a 15 or 20 mile round trip. Best Buy is for suckers.)

Or, I can order from Amazon, who will deliver to my front porch, and I have yet to see a UPS truck leave our neighborhood without making multiple stops.

UPS is really good at their business. I'll bet those trucks are running as efficiently as possible, and I'd swear they've gotten smaller in recent years.

Sometimes this weird courier service delivers it, and they're usually in either a 3/4-ton panel van (E250 or something) or a car. I don't know if they make other stops in the neighborhood or not.

Sometimes the USPS brings some of it, and they were going to drive through every day whether I got something or not.

My gut says that the negative environmental impact is in the packaging, not the travel. Each thing will come in a little box or envelope, which I will either reuse or toss in the recycle bin.

(From a personal economic standpoint, my wife paid for Prime with Amazon, so it's free shipping, and the total bill was less than $25.)

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[shikaisi]

Thank you for helping me to justify my love of dining out on environmental grounds. It's nice to feel well fed and righteous.

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[paeanblack]

Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

--Tennessee Ford

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[ResidentSourcerer]

Where delivery isn't built into the prices, it seems that typical delivery costs are $10 to $15 for an item, at least until you get to the 'bigger than a breadbox' size.

To operate my pickup (Don't shoot me, I can't deliver trees in a Subaru) costs about 40 cents per kilometer. So if picking something up is more than 30 km ($12) round trip, then economically I should get it delivered.

Since the nearest good city for shopping is 75 km away, I try to clump purchases. E.g. last week, I combined delivery 400 trees, picking up a crate of pots, doing the grocery shopping, stopping at a book store, picking up plumbing fittings at the hardware store, and stopping at the cardlock for gas for the truck and the lawnmower.

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[Steven_Lunn]

Yes boss!

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[natehoy]

The problem is, if you get a package delivered they are almost 100% certain to deliver to multiple homes in a trip. Even if they drive a few miles between each house, the major part of the drive out is done with a full vehicle. The big difference is that they can adjust their vehicle size and routes to accommodate the number of packages, whereas you probably can't because you've got only one or two vehicles and can't consolidate trips easily with 5 neighbors.

Each package may be delivered separately to your house, but it's rare that the package delivery van has just your package in it. The vans usually leave the distribution center packed full, with a route designed to empty the van of packages in the fewest miles possible.

If the delivery company has just a few packages in your vicinity, they'll use a very small and efficient vehicle to get them there, or outsource the final mile to USPS or a local courier service or someone else who is more likely to be visiting you on a daily basis, whatever costs them the least in terms of fuel and wages.

The thing is, UPS makes a living figuring out how to get packages in your hands in the most economical way possible, and their three highest expenses are wages, fuel, and vehicle maintenance. Anything they can do to get packages to you in the most efficient manner possible goes directly to their profit margin.

And, of course, if you want to talk environmental, let's talk environmental. How about the impact of building and maintaining the store? One big box outlet is going to consume the building materials and space necessary to build a large apartment complex, consume the energy of at least a few dozen homes, and require that at least 10-15 people or more drive to it every day whether they sell anything or not (employees).

If 500 people living an average of 10 miles away visited the store and bought something today, that would be 500 people driving 20 miles, or 1000 vehicle-miles. If half of those things were small enough to go USPS, then you could save 500 vehicle-miles simply by having the store mail those items. Give UPS a ten-mile radius delivery zone with 250 packages and they'll figure out how to do it in a hell of a lot less than 500 vehicle-miles.

There's a lot to be said for shopping locally. Easier exchanges/returns, look at the physical goods before you buy, supporting the local economy, etc etc.

Environmental impact is not one of them, unless you're talking about something that is produced right at the store, and even then it's a crapshoot.

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[Anonymous Coward]

It may not make for a better lifestyle, but if efficiency is the goal, this is what you do.

but it DOES make for a better lifestyle. This sounds like paradise. Like a workers' paradise. FoxConn, here I come!

Actually it only sounds good if you put an EPCOT spin on it, otherwise it just sounds like Soylent Green.

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[natehoy]

An increase in population density is beneficial only in that it frees up enough land to support the resource requirements of that population and minimizes the impact of that population.

"Efficiency" has only one really important aspect, honestly, and that is "sustainability". In other words, "can what you are doing be done continuously for as long as necessary without consuming some resource which will run out and for which there is no replacement?" The environment's ability to absorb pollution is part of that resource pool.

In a truly rural society, every person has the space and capacity to feed and support him/herself. You have a family of 4-8 people and 100-200 acres of resources at your disposal, which provides you with enough growing wood that you can harvest what you need for heat building and repairs and still have biomass growing faster than you consume it, enough clearable land to lay down staple food crops without destroying all of your trees, and enough of an animal population to replenish itself quickly enough that you won't harvest it to extinction. It also allows you to separate your drinking water and your septic systems sufficiently that the land can filter out the impurities for you. Population density must be kept low, and if you start engaging in unsustainable behavior you die.

As population densities increase, you might work with a few neighbors to make your resource usage more efficient. If Zeke has a forest that grows back really fast and Jake seems to have a plot of land that grows bigger potatoes, Zeke might trade a few cord of wood a year for a truckload of potatoes from Jake. Hank gets an extra couple of deer that year, so he gives one each to Zeke and Jake in return for something he's got a shortage of. That's the start of interdependence.

Once density reaches a certain point, you have to switch from primarily independence (rural) to primarily interdependence (urban) to keep everyone fed. If your family plot is 4 acres, you aren't going to be able to feed yourself and heat your house and keep your drinkable water and your shit separated. Similarly, in areas where you don't have all the resources you need to survive, you'll have to switch to at least a partly interdependent system to import the resources you need.

As populations continue to increase relative to the fertility of the land you're on, you have to become more interdependent to the point where you are basically importing every resource you need. That resource has to be imported from somewhere, so you have to have some land set aside somewhere to grow/harvest your food and filter your water and process your waste. Chances are, you're paying for most or all of those things to be done for you.

Once you have an "urban" (completely interdependent) population, "efficiency" takes on different meanings, because you are separated from the immediate impacts of your actions (if you overeat, you'll simply buy more food from the store, but you as an individual won't run out of food like you would on a subsistence farm). You can freely engage, as an individual, in "unsustainable" practices, and as long as the majority of the population doesn't do the same the society as a whole is sustainable.

But, more importantly, even though an increase in population density on a continental scale is never good, it inevitably happens. Once you've reached urbanization your best bet is to get the people crammed in as small an area as is feasible using the least resources possible, so you free up the most land around that urban area to provide it with the food and water and other resources it needs.

At some point in urbanization, having individual kitchens in apartments becomes less efficient than a central kitchen.

It takes a lot of energy to package, refrigerate, and cook small amounts of food in millions of individual living spaces, where a few hundred room-sized freezers and automobile-sized ovens could accomplish the same goal in a lot less space, with a lot less waste, using a lot less ene

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[TheLink]

Actually it only sounds good if you put an EPCOT spin on it, otherwise it just sounds like Soylent Green.

Well you could put a Google spin on it:

http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2006/11/new_google_cafeteria_crushes_c.html
http://www.neatorama.com/2009/02/24/googles-cafeteria-doesnt-suck/

Basically Google staff can work, eat at Google. All Google needs is to add decent living quarters and they can do a "less evil Foxconn" :).

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[TheLink]

It depends a lot on where you go, how you get there[2] and many other factors :).

But yeah, eating out or in a workplace cafeteria[1] can actually be more efficient than doing grocery shopping and cooking for yourself - you might even waste more food on average than a well-run cafeteria (I know people who buy lots of stuff on sale, and have to throw a lot of it away because they are way past expiry, lose track, or lose the desire to eat the same thing, or the purchased portions just don't match well with "healthy serving portions").

In many high density cities, having your own kitchen is a luxury. If you're single you wouldn't be using your kitchen that much. In contrast a workplace cafeteria's kitchens would be in use many times a day or even night (for 24/7 places).

[1] workplace cafeterias don't have to be bad:
Apparently Google has some decent ones: http://www.neatorama.com/2009/02/24/googles-cafeteria-doesnt-suck/
And Microsoft too: http://buckleyplanet.typepad.com/cafetour/cafeteria_tour_2006/

[2] for some figures:
The average sedentary person needs about 2000 Calories = 8 megajoules a day.
1 litre of petrol has 34 megajoules, and a car can travel about 8-10 km on one litre.

I assume it costs more than 8 megajoules of petroleum to farm, transport, cook that 2000 Calories worth of food for you (boiling 1 litre of water already costs 314 kilojoules). So your own transportation costs might not be that bad in comparison.

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[Anonymous Coward]

It may not make for a better lifestyle, but if efficiency is the goal, this is what you do.

Pirate ships were efficiently run, but I wouldn't want to live there either.

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[ScrewMaster]

I believe that's what the old folks call an "I coulda had a V-8" moment...

Whaddya mean, "old folks"?

Begs the question.

[RightSaidFred99]

Who shops online for environmental reasons?

Re:Begs the question.

[commodore64_love]

(raises hand)

Although I admit my main motive is not solely pollution, but also eliminating the 5 dollar and 45-60 minute cost of the drive. I'd like to work from home for the same reason.

Re:Begs the question.

[Suki I]

Who shops online for environmental reasons?

I know people who do too. It never made sense to me either. I do it for the convenience, but not for anything I need to try on before deciding, like shoes.

Similar thought, I was all revved up to try Best Buy order online and pick up at the store service until a friend did it. He was livid, waiting all day and finally having to call to see if the items had been picked, then going there and finding they picked some of the wrong items. His advice: see if they have everything you want in stock then go there yourself and pick it from the shelf.

Re:Begs the question.

[jridley]

I do. But I think I may qualify for one of those exemptions. On the rare occasions that I do go out to buy something, it's at least 40 kilometers if I just go somewhere and back again, and usually it's more than 50 kilometers.

But I also shop online to save my own time. It's at least an hour, more likely two of my time to go out and buy something. Translated into working overtime instead, that shopping trip cost me $50 or more just in time wasted.

Also, I have access to much better information and can make a more informed purchase when I'm online. In a store, I just have to go by what the thing looks like in a plastic coffin, and I don't have nearly the choice I do online.

Re:Begs the question.

[jridley]

I've got better advice. Stay the hell away from Best Buy. What a hole. Moronic salespeople, highest prices around, bad selection, worst technicians on the planet, and a corporate policy to intentionally drive off people who are actually shopping for a good deal.

Re:Begs the question.

[h4rr4r]

I tried this once too, a cheap netbook. First they claimed they could not find it, then they tried to give me the wrong one, then they refused to give me one off the shelf since I had already paid and would have to take the unit they set aside for me. It took 45 minutes to get a ~$200 toy they had on the damn shelf.

Re:Begs the question.

[cheekyjohnson]

Yeah, really. I shop at Newegg to get cheaper computer parts (before I knew about it, I was going to places like Walmart, and I've seen 120GB external hard drives for over $100 there!).

Re:Begs the question.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've nothing buy good experiences with BBY instore pickup. I've used it about 5 times at two different stores over the past year and both times they had it ready to go before I was ready to go get it (less than 30 mins) The purchases ranged from a $10 web cam to a Mac mini, so I doubt that had anything to do with it.

Re:Begs the question.

[Grimbleton]

I've found good deals there. It's just that you have to do your homework - It's great to have a web-enabled smartphone on you at all times, especially when shopping.

Re:Begs the question.

[Khyber]

"Who shops online for environmental reasons?"

The very people that would buy my environmentally-friendly LED panels, since you can't just typically drive to a store and buy them.

Re:Begs the question.

[afidel]

I do, but it's mostly non-physical goods, ie buy an MP3 album instead of a CD or a video download instead of buying a DVD. There's also anything that uses USPS, since they are stopping at my house anyways it has to be more fuel efficient to throw a disc on a plane (few ounces) than for me to drive 10+ miles to the nearest video store with a decent selection.

Re:Begs the question.

[smokin_juan]

"I'd like to work from home for the same reason."

Companies need to get their heads out of their asses about this.

Re:Begs the question.

[PMuse]

Not me. I shop online to save myself going from store to store trying to find some merchant in my metro area that has the item I want at a semi-reasonable price.

Oh, wait.

Re:Begs the question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Faggots. That's who.

Re:Begs the question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Requiring my presence in the office means that I can't be replaced by some guy in Bangladesh. As much as I would like to work from home with my dick out and with a margarita in my hand, I can see the benefits of being in the office. If your boss never sees you, there's a good chance he never thinks about you. That's a bad thing.

Re:Begs the question.

[PopeRatzo]

Who shops online for environmental reasons?

Yes, but did you know that besides being horrible for the environment, shopping online is also bad for male potency and kills cute kittens?

This message brought to you by the Chamber of Commerce.

Re:Begs the question.

[GiveBenADollar]

I shop online for environmental reasons or at least for the cost of gas reasons. It's not a simple 20 minute trip for me to pick up anything I might want because I'm in a small town. If I want something that isn't sold locally then it's at least an hour drive. And by not sold locally, we don't even have a major home improvement store! So without shoping online I can forget about buying a new hard drive or a new bowling ball unless I want to drive.

Re:Begs the question.

[profplump]

since they are stopping at my house anyways it has to be more fuel efficient to throw a disc on a plane (few ounces) than for me to drive 10+ miles

That's the part of this study I can't figure out. I know delivery trucks are not uber-efficient from a MPG perspective, but they carry lots of packages and have relatively high density delivery routes, at least when compared to the single-destination shopping that most people do. How can it possibly be more efficient on a per-item basis to drive the store, pick up the item, and drive back, than to add a 1 pound and 1 stop to an existing delivery route? Or does this study compare non-vehicular shopping trips to delivery services?

Re:Begs the question.

[muridae]

Depends on the routes, the population density, and the number of packages shipped one a given day. If the shipping companies developed a system where they would only service Remote Area A when there were either multiple packages, or a package had been waiting for a while, or there were other deliveries close to A, then the densely packed truck would probably have an advantage. In a more rural area, the trucks might have to drive 20 minutes to an hour just to deliver a few packages to a small town. If there is no coordination from the company shipping the product, or the shipping company, that route may have to be serviced every day or two, resulting in lots of half empty trucks making the same run. I didn't read the article (does anyone?) but I can think of some ways that the 'must arrive in 2 days' crowd could combine with a rural area to decrease the efficiency.

Re:Begs the question.

[vidnet]

I've seen 120GB external hard drives for over $100 [at Walmart]

Sounds about right. Or was this after 2004?

Re:Begs the question.

[penguinchris]

I believe I did the best buy instore pickup twice, but I can only remember what one of them was. It was quite a while ago - haven't bought anything from best buy in years. I hate going in there.

However, I had a good experience with the instore pickup. I paid for something they said they had in stock... a $15 PC gamepad. Why I thought it would be a good idea to pay for it online instead of just picking it up from the shelf, I'm not sure... but when I got there, it turned out they didn't actually have any in stock. Instead, they gave me the $25 version for no extra charge. Not what I was expecting from a place like that.

Now that most of their competitors are gone (CompUSA, Circuit City, other regional/local stores), they've only gotten worse. They're basically the only store in that category around Western New York, where I grew up and am currently living (in my mom's basement, so to speak).

When I lived in California it was great because of Fry's. Fry's sucks in a lot of ways too, but at least they have a huge selection and usually good prices (you have to be careful but at least it's worth checking there, unlike best buy).

Re:Begs the question.

[cheekyjohnson]

After. Just a few years ago, actually. 2007, I believe.

Re:Begs the question.

[somersault]

My boss works from home 3 days a week anyway, why can't I? :/

Re:Begs the question.

[Jedi Alec]

I see my boss about once a week anyway, mostly to catch up. He does his thing, I do mine and we have phones and e-mail when something needs to be discussed.

All a matter of mutual trust and understanding.

Then again, living in a country where the concept of "at-will" employment would be ludicrous helps too I suppose.

Re:Begs the question.

[moonbender]

Assuming for a moment that, on average, delivery by USPS is cheaper (in the relevant sense) than the customer going to the store themselves: there is still the difference between the cost of the items being shipped wholesale to the store and individually to the customer. The former is necessarily cheaper than the latter, the question is by how much and if the difference is big enough to cancel out any reduced costs implied by the previous assumption.

I'm speculating that wholesale transport is that much cheaper and goes a long way to cover the customer's traveling to the store. I'm also fairly sure that on average, USPS is not cheaper, ie. the previous assumption is false. Sure, if you live in a rural/suburban place and you factor in a drive to the store for every individual item you buy, then the trip by USPS will be cheaper. But that's not how it works: often you buy several items at the same store/mall, and often you are mobile anyway and stop at the store on a trip you would have made anyway, making the stop at the store just as "free" as the USPS stop. And the average case also covers the many city dwellers, who don't have to make long trips, often short enough to be done by foot/bike/subway.

Re:Begs the question.

[TheRaven64]

Requiring my presence in the office means that I can't be replaced by some guy in Bangladesh

Sure you can - he'll just be required to be in the office in Bangladesh. And working form home means that you can compete for jobs all over the world, not just within walking / driving distance of you. I live in the UK, but I don't currently work for anyone in the EU - my clients are all in Asia or the USA. I work from home, looking out over the sea, and people judge me on the work I do, not on my attendance.

If your boss never sees you, there's a good chance he never thinks about you. That's a bad thing.

If your only interaction with your boss is him seeing you, then you can probably be replaced by a cardboard cutout.

Re:Begs the question.

[yotto]

Now there's an idea. Cardboard cutout in the cube, work from home!

Everybody's happy!

Re:Begs the question.

[Anonymous Coward]

So what they're saying, is that it's more wasteful to shop online than locally, with the exception for situations where it's more wasteful to shop locally than online.

Gotcha.

Re:Begs the question.

[Ritchie70]

The USPS is required to deliver mail, every day except Sunday, to every US address. So if you mail something it's doing the "last mile" (or last 50 miles) on a truck that was almost certainly going anyway.

Don't assume it's a big truck, or a truck at all. Some of the stuff I buy from Amazon shows up in a passenger car, delivered by some courier service.

Re:Begs the question.

[Anonymous Coward]

The poster did say USPS, uot UPS or FedEx. Tyhe USPS stops ant every house every day, even if it's for jsut a psot card.
Your wonderful government at work.

Re:Begs the question.

[apoc.famine]

I dunno, I can see the sense in it. UPS and FedEX have pretty set routes. They're driving the bulk of them every day, no matter the package load. Adding one more package only adds marginally more energy expenditure as opposed to you driving any distance to the store to get what you need and back again. If you're causing UPS to have to drive far off their normal route, it might be bad.

In the US, we have a pretty consistent backbone of "(air)port->warehouse->distribution center". Even if goods come into your (air)port, then get sent to Walmart's main warehouse on one coast, they still either have to travel to you or the nearest store. Like I said above, it's likely that UPS or FedEX already come very near your house - they have good coverage. If you're dragging them 20 miles out some dirt road they don't normally go out, it's probably a lot more fuel. If they're already going by, it's probably not much more costly from an energy standpoint. (Of course, this me as US centric rambling - the authors noted that the UK was a far different story.)

As a useless anecdote, I used to live about 80 miles from the nearest Best Buy or other electronics store. However, there were a couple of businesses in town that used UPS multiple times a week. Shipping from NewEgg was far less energy intensive than driving to Best Buy and back. All the UPS trucks and planes were already doing those routes. I'd have added 160 miles of single-occupant car driving to get stuff. I can't believe that Best Buy's shipping train was so much more efficient than NewEgg + UPS that it would still win after adding 160 miles of me driving to get stuff.

Re:Begs the question.

[stewbacca]

What if, like me, you ARE the boss? The only reason I 'have' to come into the office is to check up on my workers? I can do that from home, while they work from home. I can tell by their production if they are being, well, productive.

Re:Begs the question.

[drinkypoo]

How did this get marked troll? I've seen the very same thing happen at Circuit City, and does anyone really believe that the salesdroids at Best Buy are any more competent than they were at Circuit Shitty? Indeed, the last time I went into a Best Buy I bought a subnotebook. I had to personally walk around and check the cages (which are on the floor under the displays) for my product because they couldn't find it. Add shipping and receiving into this equation and tell me if you think it will improve anything.

Re:Begs the question.

[npsimons]

Yes, but did you know that besides being horrible for the environment, shopping online is also bad for male potency and kills cute kittens?

This message brought to you by the Chamber of Commerce.

I'm all for buying as locally as possible, both for environmental and for political reasons. Environmentally, it usually does involve less gas burned (especially since I can ride my bicycle to a lot of the local shops). Politically, it means more of my money stays locally (local sales taxes, wages paid to local employees, etc), and I have more control over my local politicians than I do those in some other state or country.

All this being said, there are many things I cannot buy in town; and I hate driving just to shop (which I also hate). Plus it's also more efficient to batch my purchases with others on a UPS or FedEx big rig than for me and four of my closest friends to go on a buying spree in a car.

This whole article does reek of brick and mortars (who usually run the Chamber's of Commerce) whining about the inevitable downsizing that is a secondary effect of a highly connected (both information and shipping wise) planet.

Re:Begs the question.

[Hognoxious]

Many bosses don't have a clue about what their subordinates produce, which is a bit of a barrier to judging their productivity.

Noting down what time they arrive and leave is easy. I had a boss once who used to time people's toilet breaks.

Re:Begs the question.

[Suki I]

I have been hearing of Fry's for years through geekworld. Still need to make a point of visiting one if I am ever near one again.

Re:Begs the question.

[stevesy17]

Requiring my presence in the office means that I can't be replaced by some guy in Bangladesh.

Yet.

ultimate low impact

[jewishbaconzombies]

The moral of the story? Save the planet. Kill yourself.

Re:ultimate low impact

[compro01]

Do you have any idea how much gas people will burn to get to your funeral? Or how much GHGs will be released to make your coffin? Or methane your rotting corpse will release or how much energy would be used to cremate it?

Re:ultimate low impact

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea how much gas people will burn to get to your funeral? Or how much GHGs will be released to make your coffin? Or methane your rotting corpse will release or how much energy would be used to cremate it?

You're right...kill all your friend and family first, eat them all, then kill yourself by jumping into a tank full of barracuda.

Re:ultimate low impact

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just "consume" less crap.

Re:ultimate low impact

[TheGothicGuardian]

The only logical answer is to nuke everyone from orbit.

Re:ultimate low impact

[bm_luethke]

Not much energy to cremate if we all killed ourselves - no one to run the crematoriums. Further the Methane from rotting would be less than many natural source we have now - plus since it is all in one big month long rotting fest it isn't like years of accumulation. It's not like the earth doesn't have natural scrubbers of green house gasses (otherwise known as plants and many types of bacteria).

There are two basic ways for us to lower pollution output: stop living our modern high energy lifestyles or have an extreme technological breakthrough. I doubt the latter is going to occur anytime soon, even if it was discovered today there would be no way we could mass produce it enough to effectively change over our lifestyles and infrastructure (and it would have to be massive gains for it to most likely be worth the energy cost of the constructions of the new technology and recycling the waste from the old). Even if telecommuting and online line shopping saved some it is like trying to stop a hurricane by building a 4x8 wall to block the winds. There is no way for us to simply make minor shifts in technology yet live the same lifestyle and change anything - indeed we tend to not fully understand the issues yet enough to know if changes are often a net positive or negative (other than we know if we killed off most of us and went back to a nomadic life it would immediately stop).

If the situation is as dire as many say it is we are simply doomed one way or another - the ultimate question then becomes do we accept that and do what has to be done or wait till it degenerates into anarchy and only the strong survive. While the GP is a joke, it is unfortunately the only conclusion one has to draw if the models are correct. If the models are incorrect and it is not a dire situation then we are all wasting time too. Personally I'll take the slow way as we will find out eventually who is correct and other than it happening in a longer period of time the end result is going to be the same, but in the end it *is* "Save the planet, Kill yourself" if the predictions are correct, its just the manner of how we do it and the amount of time it takes.

Re:ultimate low impact

[Anonymous Coward]

"Do you have any idea how much gas people will burn to get to your funeral?"

Less than you use a month.

"Or methane your rotting corpse will release"

Not much, bodily fermentation isn't like a cow's stomach.

"how much energy would be used to cremate it?"

Not too much, still.

Re:ultimate low impact

[gilleain]

Think of the rocket fuel! No, no the best plan will be to form a giant human pyramid, and when the topmost human reaches a point where gravity is weak enough, he can start pulling everyone else into space.

Then we all just drift peacefully off...

Re:ultimate low impact

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the only way to be sure.

Re:ultimate low impact

[couchslug]

"The moral of the story? Save the planet. Kill yourself."

Do I get pollution tax credits for killing others?

Re:ultimate low impact

[cheekyjohnson]

Alternatively, work to find a clean, renewable, and efficient energy source.

Re:ultimate low impact

[invient]

There should be a world-wide radio / televisions / internet report claiming that if you do not kill yourself the world will end.... That way, the stupid people that believe everything they are told will off themselves, thus improving our gene pool... then just redesign urban centers so that all products bought and sold are produced as locally as possible with anyone not providing those products will use telecommuting. The only time that anything needs to be moved by fossil fuels then will be for restocking of distribution centers for non-locally produced items... While I am at it, free internet and water for everyone, 100% energy from solar, and easily manufactured standardized homes and neighborhoods. And a political system completely based on the internet, anyone can run and produce campaign videos, and online voting... each campaign gets x amounts of dollars to produce the campaign and can not get any funds from any other source besides petitioning to an AI which will then decide to distribute more funds.... ...it could happen... in the future... past the singularity. We can at least get the first part done soon.

Re:ultimate low impact

[eugene ts wong]

What?!?

Nobody offered me any credits for killing! Is it too late to get paid retroactively? Please?

Re:ultimate low impact

[Mr. Slippery]

(other than we know if we killed off most of us and went back to a nomadic life it would immediately stop).

Nope. Nomadic mammoth-hunters created climate change too. Primitivism is no answer. Sustainability requires a high technology, but a very different sort than the ones we emphasize now.

Re:ultimate low impact

[afidel]

Cremate with the traditional Viking method, trees are carbon neutral =)

Re:ultimate low impact

[htdrifter]

"The moral of the story? Save the planet. Kill yourself."

Do I get pollution tax credits for killing others?

Only in the tax year of your demise.

Re:ultimate low impact

[daveime]

A hell of a lot less than when you were alive and had to be visited at regular intervals, you lemon. And people had to bring you food. And medication. And possibly daily care. And trips out with the other old folks.

I could go on, but really, do I need to ?

You win the prize for the dumbest comment I've seen on Slashdot today.

Re:ultimate low impact

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be a world-wide radio / televisions / internet report claiming that if you do not kill yourself the world will end.... That way, the stupid people that believe everything they are told will off themselves, thus improving our gene pool...

The Golgafrinchims weren't too successful in getting rid of the B-ark...

Re:ultimate low impact

[Igmuth]

Building the space elevator out of human bodies. I'm intrigued.

Re:ultimate low impact

[bm_luethke]

There is a difference between going back to a nomadic life and coming from one - primitive man was horrid on the environment. They planted one crop until it would no longer grow and moved on, they killed indiscriminately, they did a great deal of damage. The article quoted simply restates that idea and I doubt many will argue.

There is no "sustainability" in a modern high tech world. We require roads, buildings, energy, food, and a great deal of other infrastructure to live. Even if that is as low an impact as possible with respect to emissions do you *really* think that our concrete cities somehow are "sustainable"? Are we just going to keep building up? I guess instead of Turtles all the we down we will have concrete all the way up?

It is an inherently non-sustainable system. We survive by hoping to find new places to rob to pay for what we have taken. It *will* run out at some point.

It's not like computing resources where there is some finite level we can shrink things - it is still going to be a while before we truly hate that barrier. But when we do computers just aren't going to go away. When we hit the finite barrier with resources we start dying.

When we reach a point where there is nothing left to consume to pay for us it will stop. Maybe that will last long enough that we finally get enough space exploration that we can rob a great number of places (and thus meet my definition of radical technological changes - outside of breaking some fairly major laws I do not see anything outside of that working), but I doubt it.

Peak oil will happen, at some point we will be required to make a choice between housing/shelter and food plots, and we will surpass our ability to gather energy. Wind, Solar, Geothermal, Coal, Oil, Tidal, all of them require room to have the manufacturing *and* have environmental impacts too (some of those minor when used as an alternative, major when used a primary source).

Which leaves us - as a race - two real options: create some radical piece of technology that fixes this (in science fiction we can see this in Star Trek), or eventually fall back to a nomadic life style (which implies our current knowledge but at a much reduced global population).

Like Moore's law running out I'm not going to be betting it will happen in my life time, but one of those two things is inevitable. There is still a lot this Earth has to give. However the models given by most of our experts on Global Ecology vehemently disagree with that and say if we do not radically change in the next 20 years we will die. I just have to note for the last 30 or so years doom has been 10-20 years away.

There is nothing we can do with respect to "sustainability" to counter what their models show. At best we put things off and hope for a miracle. I find their "science" quite lacking (indeed, that it passes peer review shows how bad our educational system has become) and think we have longer than that - yet the ultimate conclusion is still more correct than wrong.

That being said plenty of reasons to adopt a great deal of those practices. If done well it saves in costs, health, and overall quality of life. The sad thing is that those things would have been good enough to get mostly passed. But no, we have to have the world ending 10-20 years from now. So we stay at our current rate of consumption, ignore the real threats because the fake ones have been so over-aggrandized, and march our merry way to oblivion for political reasons.

However, thanks for trying I guess.

Re:ultimate low impact

[demersus]

That would make things exponentially worse though. Think of how many funerals we would have then! Unless of course all your friends suck and have no family or friends of their own. Then, by all means, carry on.

Re:ultimate low impact

[BlitzTech]

Just don't turn into a zombie, because everyone knows the zombie apocalypse is not the same as saving the world*.

*: Only applies to certain definitions of "saving the world"

Re:ultimate low impact

[Duradin]

If you call it "sequestering someone's carbon" then you do get the tax credit.

Re:ultimate low impact

[camperdave]

I'm reminded of the bacteria in the test tube. It started out as one single cell with a full tube of agar. It thought "I eat only so much agar per hour. I've got enough food to last forever". So it doubled. And over the course of time, it doubled again, and again, and again. After a while, the tube was 1/8 full of bacteria. Some of them started saying "Let's slow down. We'll run out of food". "Nonsense!" the other bacteria cried. "We eat only so much agar per hour. We've got enough food to last us for a long time. We're not even a quarter of the way through our supply." And over the course of time, they doubled. "We must slow down" cried the cautious ones. "Nonsense! At our current rate of consumption, we've got enough food to last for a long time. We could feed all the bacteria that have ever lived and still only be half way.

Two generations later, they were all dead.

Re:ultimate low impact

[jewishbaconzombies]

Well, I do have enough responses to this to qualify for a minor suicide cult - is there any good money in that?

I mean how much did Jim Jones make - before he invested in Kool Aid?

Re:ultimate low impact

[somersault]

Bacteria that could talk and leave records for other species to learn from? Most impressive. I shall mourn them.

Re:ultimate low impact

[azalin]

And a political system completely based on the internet, anyone can run and produce campaign videos, and online voting... each campaign gets
x amounts of dollars to produce the campaign and can not get any funds from any other source besides petitioning to an AI which will then decide
to distribute more funds....

and in related news: President P0wn3d D Lolcatz announced the hamster dance to be the new world anthem. All hail the hamsters!

Re:ultimate low impact

[drinkypoo]

If you call it "sequestering someone's carbon" then you do get the tax credit.

So that is what the US Government was doing with mass graves on base in Panama, trying to offset their environmental impact. It all makes sense now. I wonder how much carbon we offset in Guatemala. (And we just keep on keeping on...)

Re:ultimate low impact

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, if you're a corporation.

Re:ultimate low impact

[geminidomino]

Unless, like... you're one of them, man. /weed logic

Re:ultimate low impact

[Hatta]

Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to keep a tank of barracuda alive?!

Re:ultimate low impact

[MozeeToby]

You're begging the question "will human population continue to increase?" The answer is almost assuredly 'no', looking at cultures that have high standards of living the rate of population change is already 0 or below, having children is not a biological imperative at the same level that we have always assumed. It can be turned off to the point where population growth is stopped.

Given this fact, and I know this sounds ludicrous at first blush, population will be controlled by market forces. Why don't people have 6-10 kids anymore? It's all nice and snarky to say that the current generation is selfish, but the fact is that every generation has felt that way about the next generation, it is unlikely to be true. There has to be a reason, and the most likely culprit is cost, it is simply more expensive to raise a child today than it was 40 years ago largely because of all the 'advances' in child education and care. Eventually, the costs associated with having a child will outweigh the perceived benefit of having children. It has already happened with millions of young adults who have chosen to wait to have kids until they are more economically developed, despite the risks associated with having children in your 30's instead of your 20's.

Re:ultimate low impact

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is no "sustainability" in a modern high tech world. We require roads, buildings, energy, food, and a great deal of other infrastructure to live. Even if that is as low an impact as possible with respect to emissions do you *really* think that our concrete cities somehow are "sustainable"? Are we just going to keep building up? I guess instead of Turtles all the we down we will have concrete all the way up?"

Yes, only one word in that paragraph is unsustainable: energy, since right now we're getting it from fossil fuels (millions of years of stored solar energy being burned in a few centuries). All the other things can be done in a sustainable way if the energy to do them comes from a sustainable source. All our high tech material things are made of materials that are both abundant and recyclable. (Even the plastic is, to a certain degree, something we can recycle into its component chemicals, and something we can make from raw materials other than oil. The oil is just the cheapest way to get it right now). Most of the other problems not caused by oil are problems caused by stupidity, not inherent absolute failures of modernity; I'm thinking of things like poor water planning, soil erosion/depletion caused by farming it the wrong way, etc.

Population growth in stable technological societies is zero (or negative!), so it's not like we'll need to build much more standard infrastructure than we already have.

Re:ultimate low impact

[Anonymous Coward]

"There are two basic ways for us to lower pollution output: stop living our modern high energy lifestyles or have an extreme technological breakthrough. I doubt the latter is going to occur anytime soon, even if it was discovered today there would be no way we could mass produce it enough to effectively change over our lifestyles and infrastructure (and it would have to be massive gains for it to most likely be worth the energy cost of the constructions of the new technology and recycling the waste from the old)."

If workable fusion power was discovered today, even if it would cost billions to build a power plant big enough to run a city, we would certainly build enough of them to make extreme changes. That is an awful lot of heating/cooking/power/transportation oil/coal no longer burned. Additional lifestyle changes would, of course, speed our transition to sustainability; but the non-polluting power source would also enable a lot of those changes too.

Of course, once you have one fusion plant, you can start using its output to build the new stuff. More fusion plants of course, but also solar panels and wind turbines and batteries. Move trains and heating and cooking to electric, cars to mostly electric, freight trucks to electric if possible or at least to hybrids that can run E85. Since current transportation fuel is 10% ethanol, if we can get rid of 90% of our travel fuel needs, we can actually run what's left on the ethanol production rates we already have. Looking up a chart of oil use in the US, it may only be practical in the short term to cut out 80% of total oil demand, but if that means the remaining 20% is half ethanol and half oil, we have ten times as much remaining oil (time!) to figure out how to close the rest of the gap. Ideally we'd eventually only be using oil for fertilizer - and at a reduced amount, through better land use management - which would extend the lifetime of our oil supply pretty much indefinitely.

We can start doing some of this now to a lesser extent, positioning ourselves to make the rest of the transition faster once we DO have fusion working, since the same iterative approach applies; use solar and wind farms to power the manufacture of more solar and wind farms, for example, and we can reach our maximum potential for those sources much faster and greener than otherwise. I don't know if we can fully meet all power needs that way - it'd take some serious improvements to the electrical grid at the very least - but it's a start, and every barrel of oil not pumped today is carbon not released today and oil left for when we need it tomorrow, right?

Re:ultimate low impact

[Shadowlore]

There are two basic ways for us to lower pollution output: stop living our modern high energy lifestyles or have an extreme technological breakthrough. I doubt the latter is going to occur anytime soon, even if it was discovered today there would be no way we could mass produce it enough to effectively change over our lifestyles and infrastructure (and it would have to be massive gains for it to most likely be worth the energy cost of the constructions of the new technology and recycling the waste from the old).

The facts bely your claim. The facts are that in the US at least, our pollution out has been decreasing for a very long time. Not that it makes news (until a politician of any stripe wants to claim he or she is responsible for it), pollution has in fact gone down significantly over the last 40+ years. Same with water pollution. Meanwhile, energy per-capita has increased. Not suprising given that cleaner technology usually requires more energy (most recycling consumes more energy than it "saves" for example), and that we as a group mus thave enough "excess" energy available to use the cleaner technology.

Advances don't generally happen suddenly, a point you make. However you seem to forget the fact that advances incrementally over time lead to more improvement than single one-shot advances, Further, not all improvements are the result of improving technology. Often they are ways of being smarter about things. For example, carrying more cargo per trip reducing the energy use of the cargo over taking two trucks to deliver it. Indeed, as some research shows more efficient technology can lead to an increase in net energy use. The effect is similar to reduced-calorie foods. Cut the calories in half and many people eat more than double what they were previously.

As to the latter part of your statement, again the history of technological changes proves your statement false. As I've heard said "We didn't leave the stone age because we ran out of rocks". Nor the Bronze Age for want of bronze, nor Iron Age for lack of iron. We as a species and civilization do in fact continuously replace prior technology. The problem we face now is government distortion of costs through mandates and subsidies. These actions cloud the needed information of relative supply and demand, as well as the incentive to produce lower cost versions of "better" technology.

Re:ultimate low impact

[Anonymous Coward]

hey. have a look at http://www.hermannscheer.de

how do we bring on the alternatives?

Re:ultimate low impact

[Walter Carver]

No point. The state will just bury empty coffins for everyone.

Kind of short on details

[dracocat]

The article talked a lot about transportation costs. Were they just comparing transportation costs? What about the environmental impact of keeping the A/C running and lights going all day in the store?

Very very short on details.

Re:Kind of short on details

[commodore64_love]

The store where I used to work shortened its day by about 5 hours. They open one hour later, close 1/2 an hour earlier, and the janitorial staff doesn't show up at 6am anymore, instead waiting until just prior to opening (11am). That reduces A/C costs (both dollars and CO2) by about 20%.

Of course the store didn't do this for altruistic reasons. It did it because they are only getting half as many shoppers since the Web took over.

Re:Kind of short on details

[timeOday]

Unfortunately the linked article doesn't contain enough meat for meaningful discussion. If this is just another fairly blind application of Jevons Paradox (soon to become a slashdot meme!) then I'm not too interested.

Re:Kind of short on details

[h4rr4r]

Since no stores stock anything anymore they had it coming.

Re:Kind of short on details

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

Having worked for an air freight company, I can tell you the trucks and planes go the same place every day regardless of how much cargo there is. In fact, if there are "2 or 3 day air packages, or even ground", and there is reserve capacity on the airplane -- it flies. It does not cost extra to load more cargo on a DC-10 that you already paid for and fueled. It does cost extra to run a truck with a freight containers to the same location.

The end game is to send every vehicle full to capacity, and limit the number of vehicles. Freight companies do this all the time, not to limit environmental impact, but to save fuel costs. Every freight carrier runs this equation daily....and even hourly.

As for delivery, the truck is there every day anyway. It doesn't cost very much to stop. It does cost money to fire up your gas powered vehicle and drive to the mall, which is where the trucks go anyway.

Two trips or one.....take your pick....

Re:Kind of short on details

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.

Having worked for an air freight company, I can tell you the trucks and planes go the same place every day regardless of how much cargo there is.

Mod up -- in the USA this is how it works.

Re:Kind of short on details

[Anonymous Coward]

"Very very short on details."

which is why you should _never_ waste time reading TFA. Why, just by reading the comments I've picked up all kinds of great details on all sorts of exciting stuff, details that I'd never get from some stupid article. Article shmarticle. Now, what was the topic we were discussing?

Re:Kind of short on details

[arkane1234]

Reminds me of the time a couple weeks ago I went into Staples to mail something through UPS, and I looked at Bluetooth earpieces afterwards. After looking at them, I was interested in one so I looked for a box to take up to the register to pay for. I found out they had no stock, and when I asked the girl at the register she said she can quickly order through their convenient website and it'll be there in 7-14 days. I told her I could shop through a zillion websites... I held back the fact that if I truly was looking for a bluetooth for a decent price, it's cheaper online...
They forget that brick & mortar shops have that instant gratification which you can't get online. If they give that up, they may as well close up or just open a Sears style online-purchase pickup area.. but for their whole store.

Re:Kind of short on details

[Anonymous Coward]

My initial reaction was kinda the same, but I just chalked it up as a "buy locally, stimulate the economy" campaign.
A few other factors :
- The transport company is shipping a whole whack of stuff, so you needn't purchase 50 things - 49 other people have made purchases too, and it's all coming in a single box.
- Does your vehicle run as cleanly as the transport company's? I know there are pretty tough restrictions in my part of the world.
- Is what you're purchasing available to you? How far do you have to go to get what you want?

I'm pretty sure this study would conclude that it is environmentally responsible if online shopping were limited to domestic retailers.

Re:Kind of short on details

[noidentity]

Yes, all the costs of running the store: employees, insurance, rent, product sitting on the shelves, shipping the product to the store. Not that people buy online for environmental reasons anyway; I figure it's for availability, cost, and convenience.

Re:Kind of short on details

[stewbacca]

Two trips or one.....take your pick....

I see it as two half trips (meeting in the middle). I drive to the store where my goods were delivered, and the delivery guy doesn't have to come to my house.

Re:Kind of short on details

[drinkypoo]

Since no stores stock anything anymore they had it coming.

No store can stock everything the internet can stock. We are going to wind up with only car dealers, specialty boutiques, starbucks, and wal-mart. I was going to say gas stations and grocery stores but Wal-Mart implements those too. The good news is that the only one you will have to visit is Wal-Mart, for gas and perishables. Everything else can already be ordered and typically more cheaply than you can get it in the store.

Retail is going away, or at least, most of it is. And frankly, good riddance. What a waste of the best real estate.

Re:Kind of short on details

[Grishnakh]

No store can stock everything the internet can stock. We are going to wind up with only car dealers, specialty boutiques, starbucks, and wal-mart.

I don't agree with this. There's a lot of stores that seem to be doing just fine these days, even with the onslaught of internet shopping. For instance, look at Lowe's and Home Depot. If I need a part to fix my house (like a toilet valve), I do NOT want to wait a week for it to arrive by mail, I want to just go buy one and get my toilet fixed today. Also, if I'm buying a large appliance, like a dishwasher or stove, I want to buy that locally because it's a lot cheaper for me to just load it in my car and drive it home for free, rather than pay $100+ for expensive freight shipping. Also, many times I don't know exactly what I want. It's frequently easier to pick out parts I need by just searching through the bins at the store, than looking through web pages.

Of course, Lowe's and HD sorta fall into your "Wal-Mart" category, if you make that a category rather than narrowing it to Wal-Mart specifically.

Re:Kind of short on details

[Grishnakh]

The reduced costs of running an online shop vs a local B&M shop (less staff, less A/C, etc.), are all reflected in the typically lower costs at online stores. B&M stores have to have higher prices to pay for all those additional operating costs.

Re:Kind of short on details

[Grishnakh]

Airplanes use significantly more fuel when they have more cargo. The equation is very different than for trucks.

*Startling* conclusion?

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA is probably written by someone who've never bought anything online, and thinks online shopping = goods delivered by teleportation.

Next up, British Nobel prize winner discovered eating more increases pollution.

The number reason for global warming

[Anonymous Coward]

Vlad Farted.

I don't understand

[iONiUM]

So hundreds of people can be served by 1 computer (no need for sales people, which would require many to drive to/from the store), at home (they don't have to travel themselves), using the power they have on at home anyways (no need for store power), and this is somehow more than the store? I understand the actual product has shipping pollution, but I mean come on, that can't make up for everything else.

I'm confused.

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

The product can be shipped to many people in the same street directly from an energy-efficient warehouse rather than from an energy-inefficient store. Goods can be plucked off the fields on demand (reducing the amount of time they need to be in cooled storage). Goods within expiry date are used more efficiently as the ones expiring earlier will be used earlier (smaller stores have very much a problem with expiring goods)...

No way I'll accept this at all without having seen the actual study.

Re:I don't understand

[Shadow99_1]

For the US this would make even less sense... Only 4 companies handle packages like: UPS, Fedex, USPS, and one I can't recall because I've never actually used it myself... Which would imply rather than every single person having to make their driving more efficient 4 companies would... That seems an order of magnitude easier to me...

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

This may be accurate if everyone purchased online, but they don't, and the article is about the current state of reality and not the made up fantasy one where one server is servicing all consumers.

Re:I don't understand

[TheGothicGuardian]

DHL?

Re:I don't understand

[jridley]

I think a lot of it is shipping. When you order online, a single item gets stuffed into a box and shipped hundreds of miles, passing through many vehicles and hands. Very inefficient, especially given the packaging talents of some companies that put a SD memory card into a cubic-foot-sized box.

By contrast, items in stores are shipped surface using more optimal routes (less time pressure) and in bulk packaging. It's a lot cheaper in gas and everything to ship 1000 items at a time from a warehouse in a truck that's full of stuff going from that warehouse to that store and then have 1000 people come a few miles to a store and pick them up than it is to ship 1000 items from a warehouse to 1000 people's houses.

Re:I don't understand

[jridley]

DHL, Airborne plus thousands of independents. Also, Fedex Ground is a separate company from Fedex, sharing just the name. (Also, Fedex rocks, Fedex Ground sucks.) But that gets it up to 6 majors, and there may be more.

OK, DHL and Airborne aren't as big as the others but they're not small.

Re:I don't understand

[hedwards]

Nope, they only handle international packages in the US. They used to do local delivery, but the management ignored all the advice they received about how to handle the US market. They closed domestic service late in 2008, IIRC.

Re:I don't understand

[gmhowell]

By contrast, items in stores are shipped surface using more optimal routes (less time pressure)

I see you've never been a truck driver.

Re:I don't understand

[syousef]

There's nothing to be confused about. People simply lose the ability to think rationally once the emotive issue of the environment comes up. Instead they run around like headless chickens doing stupid things because their emotional buttons have been pushed.

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

So hundreds of people can be served by 1 computer (no need for sales people, which would require many to drive to/from the store), at home (they don't have to travel themselves), using the power they have on at home anyways (no need for store power), and this is somehow more than the store? I understand the actual product has shipping pollution, but I mean come on, that can't make up for everything else.

I'm confused.

The study was in Britain. Think tiny European cars, 50 mpg. And it's an island-- shoppers can't drive much; more, and many Europeans living in cities don't even drive or have a car (even tiny European cars).

OTOH, mail trucks burn lots of gas and have to make lots of stops which increase gas consumption.

Re:I don't understand

[rHBa]

MANY people in the UK (not all, but a relatively large proportion) live VERY CLOSE to their local supermarket, I'm talking walking distance. If we ALL ordered our shopping online then there would be a lot more cars/vans/lorries driving around (short distances, read high fuel consumption) but the shop would still stay open and employ nearly the same number of staff (especially in the short term because there are still a lot of people who just walk to the store) so the net energy consumption will be higher.

Re:I don't understand

[TooMuchToDo]

USPS contracts priority, express, and even some first class mail to Fedex. Sending something priority more than a couple hundred miles? It's flying a Fedex cargo plane to get across the country (express mail too). Also, DHL is mostly dead in the US.

http://www.usps.com/news/2001/press/pr01_alliance0110.htm

So, Fedex and UPS, with the USPS picking up the last mile for first class mail.

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been to European "supermarkets." They need to drop the "super" prefix because they fucking suck compared to American supermarkets. I for one enjoy eating more than just boiled beef, potatoes, and bread. Pathetic.

Re:I don't understand

[Ssherby]

There seems to be a lot of details that one has to wonder whether or not they were taken into account when conducting this "study".

For example, are they stating that driving to the store to shop has a lower impact on the environment because of what the impact is to have the product shipped, flown, driven to a nearby distribution center and then driven to your door? Then where does the impact of having the products shipped, flown, driven to a nearby distribution center and then driven to the store come into the equation? I mean, they didn't assume that the products are all manufactured on location and stored on the shelf of your nearby store, do they? Are they taking into account that the UPS or FedEx truck isn't just hauling your purchases, but many dozens of purchases at once to your neighboring community? Are they taking into account the environmental impact of that whole same neighboring community all driving their own vehicles to a store to shop for the product they can't find, then driving to the next store and trying again and again at multiple stores before they find it, followed then by the drive home again?

To suggest that you would have to purchase an average of 25 products to be shipped together and delivered in the same shipment in order to be a lessor environmental impact just seems ludicrous to me.

Re:I don't understand

[geoskd]

I think a lot of it is shipping. When you order online, a single item gets stuffed into a box and shipped hundreds of miles, passing through many vehicles and hands. Very inefficient, especially given the packaging talents of some companies that put a SD memory card into a cubic-foot-sized box.

By contrast, items in stores are shipped surface using more optimal routes (less time pressure) and in bulk packaging. It's a lot cheaper in gas and everything to ship 1000 items at a time from a warehouse in a truck that's full of stuff going from that warehouse to that store and then have 1000 people come a few miles to a store and pick them up than it is to ship 1000 items from a warehouse to 1000 people's houses.

You're way off base. The cost of shipping goods through the supply chain is more or less the same whether they ultimately get delivered to the end user, or to a retail store. The article is way off base, because the assumption is that each package must travel the hundreds of miles by itself. That simply is not true. For most (90%) of the trip, the package is routed in 54' trailers that are loaded to capacity, which is actually more efficient than pallet load and trailer load shipping, on average. The remaining portions of the trip are done with many other packages, where the trip can be shared among many stops so that the final cost of home delivery is comparable to the cost of driving to a store to get the package. The reason that shipping costs as much as it does is because of the cost of the labor to do all the driving, whereas if you are going to the store yourself, the cost of the labor to do the drive is assumed to be zero. If it weren't more efficient to ship to home than ship to store and retrieve, then the cost of shipping would be much higher than it is.

-=Geoskd

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I hadn't seen DHL in a while but the most recent item I ordered from NewEgg (using the cheapest shipping option) got shipped via "DHL GlobalMail" and its final tracking status was "tendered to USPS", so they appear to still be around (or they have re-entered the US local market?).

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

This may come as a shock to you but words have different meanings in different places. I know, it sounds hard to believe, but it really is true.

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

You know absolutely nothing about commercial freight delivery, do you?

Re:I don't understand

[JackieBrown]

Same here. I ordered an HDMI cable from newegg and DHL delivered it to my local post office who placed it in my mailbox.

Funny how a 10 ft HDMI cable costs $5.99 on newegg and $30 from BestBuy and WalMart.

Re:I don't understand

[xaxa]

OTOH, mail trucks burn lots of gas and have to make lots of stops which increase gas consumption.

I see a fair few delivery vans proclaiming their alternative fuel source (usually electricity), but that's probably since I live in London where traffic congestion is worst, so where the greatest savings are to be made. And electric vehicles are exempt from the congestion charge (for the moment).

I don't think I've ever travelled more than 50km (each way) for a shopping trip, and I can't remember the last time I went shopping in a car. I live less than five minutes from a station, so even large-ish stuff can be taken on the train with only minor inconvenience (less inconvenience than waiting for a delivery, anyway).

Re:I don't understand

[16K Ram Pack]

That's a very good point.

The working in patterns in some shops (like books and records) are best described as 30 minutes in the morning, 2 hours at lunchtime and 30 minutes before closing, and then weekends. It's very wasteful compared to what a warehouse can do.

Re:I don't understand

[moonbender]

"Goods can be plucked off the fields on demand (reducing the amount of time they need to be in cooled storage)."

Right, because that's how it works.

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever eaten anything sold at American supermarkets? Most of it is about as tasty as it is healthy...

Re:I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the operative word there was "can", as in could/hypothetically

Re:I don't understand

[moonbender]

I see. As in "pigs can fly"...

Disagree

[commodore64_love]

The postwoman is already driving past my house every day. It takes no extra gasoline for her to carry that latest Amazon book or Electronic Boutique game with her.

Plus the freight trucks that move this crap across the country burn far less gas than if we all drove to the store. ~10,000 boxes carried in one truck is more efficient than 10,000 car trips.

Re:Disagree

[jrumney]

Plus the freight trucks that move this crap across the country burn far less gas than if we all drove to the store.

Apparently goods are teleported into stores, so those large freight trucks are only involved when you buy things online.

Really, the only variable is you driving to the store for a single purchase, vs a delivery driver including your house in their rounds (a slight detour from what they would have done anyway).

Re:Disagree

[DerekLyons]

The postwoman is already driving past my house every day. It takes no extra gasoline for her to carry that latest Amazon book or Electronic Boutique game with her.

The amount of gasoline consumed is directly proportional to the weight being carried. So, yes it does take extra gasoline even though she is driving past your house every day. And if she is actually 'driving past' (as opposed to 'stopping at') your house every day, then making that stop consumes additional gasoline as she must accelerate back to speed after stopping.

Re:Disagree

[ensignyu]

It does take space, though. If the mail truck is full because lots of people are shipping stuff in the mail, they'd either have to do multiple runs or delay getting the package to you package. Or upgrade to those giant delivery trucks that UPS uses.

Besides shipping costs, though, online shopping currently generates a lot of excess packaging. Every time I order something online, I have to toss yet another cardboard box and the plastic bubble wrap in the recycle bin. I'd like to see some kind of reusable packaging.

Re:Disagree

[commodore64_love]

>>>The amount of gasoline consumed is directly proportional to the weight being carried.

A common misconception. Since her Suburban weighs around 5000 pounds the extra 2 pounds of my game or book make no measurable difference in the gasoline consumption. Put another way: Whether I carry 1 person or 4 persons in my car, I still get 35mpg regardless. The weight differential is not measurable because there are far more important factors in gasoline consumption, such as the tuning of the engine, how fast I drive (air resistance), and so on.

Re:Disagree

[commodore64_love]

Excellent point.

Re:Disagree

[hex0D]

T~10,000 boxes carried in one truck is more efficient than 10,000 car trips.

That is way too over simplified. A truck is still carrying 10K items from the factory 99% (or at least the vast majority) of the distance to your house whether it's to a shipping center or a store. From there, maybe 10K relatively fuel efficient personal vehicles driving to the store is preferable to 10K commercial truck deliveries.

Re:Disagree

[ProppaT]

You can't have it both ways. With the same logic, you could have picked up that same game while you were already at Target and had zero additional impact. If the truck is already driving by your house, I'm sure you're already driving by the store at some point.

Sure, the UPS truck is already out making rounds, but you add in all the extra stops for UPS/USPS/FedEx across the country due to people buying singular items off of Amazon just because it was a bit cheaper than the store and that adds up quickly. There are other tedious things to take into consideration too, such as bulk transport/freight vs. the trucks and airplanes shipping services use, etc. I don't know how that would pan out and I'm sure it'd be a full time job to straighten it out. Additionally, I think we also have to look at the fact that this article is focused on the UK. I'm assuming that a good deal of the online purchases in the UK come from outside of the UK, so it makes a bit more sense.

One last point, you make the assumption that the article is talking about environmental impact in the form of gas. You have to factor in all of the packaging (boxes, popcorn, plastic bags/bubbles, etc) involved vs. the pallets the store receives. Again, what doesn't negligible at first adds up over time.

Granted, the reason most of us shop online is because it can be ridiculously cheaper. We all do it and I don't see any of us changing anytime soon...but the article isn't "does the money saved in our pocket outweight the damage to the environment," it's "ordering a bunch of small things off the internet is wasteful." I know people with Amazon Prime accounts that will buy the silliest things off the internet just because they can.

Re:Disagree

[petermgreen]

One thing i've noticed in the UK is that while small online purchases (one book, one game, a small bag of components etc) are indeed often sent through the ordinary post and delivered by the postman anything slightly bigger or more valuable than that and it will most likely be sent by a courier and there are a LOT of different couriers so presumablly their delivery density is pretty low.

Though what happens with electronic components makes the consumer stuff look positively eco friendly. Considerable overpackaging (CPC are particularly bad for this) and lots of stuff getting sent by air either because of farnell overnighting stuff around europe (if a component is out of stock in leeds farnell will send it directly from one of their other european warehouses) or because the only source available is in the US (hell some companies even send their FREE SAMPLES transatlantic by air!)

Re:Disagree

[Suki I]

Excellent point.

I haven't spent much time around high-rises, but the times I have seen UPS and FedEx show up it was like they emptied the whole truck just for one building. Like the rest of you are saying, it doesn't matter if each apartment is getting one item a day or not, that truck full of boxes is coming in every day.

Re:Disagree

[Nyeerrmm]

Actually, the relationship between gas used, vehicle mass, and driving patterns is more complex.

When driving at constant speed, mass is of no consequence (except for second-order effects like tire rolling resistance). At constant speed, most of the useful energy from the drivetrain makes up for energy lost to air resistance, which is dependent on velocity, surface area, and drag coefficient.

Mass matters when accelerating and decelerating. However, when comparing a 2lb package to 3000lb vehicle thats going to be lost in the noise. It will make a difference for a semi hauling a lot of them, but in those cases starting/stopping is much less important than it is for a local mail route.

And of course, none of that accounts for the potential of a hybrid mail delivery vehicle, which stores and releases the energy from stopping and starting. While I'm usually skeptical of the advantages of hybrids, for something like a mail truck that makes frequent stops, it would be hugely advantageous.

Re:Disagree

[mysidia]

However, the truck is only driving because it is carrying items around. A certain percentage of its trip is attributable to your item. Your item uses up a limited resource, physical volume in the vehicle.

And if your item is significantly heavy, for example, you are having a 500 pound lawnmower delivered, or say a really really big rock, it can have some increase in the gas consumption of the truck.

So yes, a certain amount of gasoline is attributable to carrying your particular item. That would be one of the following...

The total number units of items you have on the truck, divided by the total number of units the truck was loaded with, multiplied by the total gas the truck consumed from the start of its journey, until the end of its journey when all items were delivered.

Or... the total volume of your item, divided by the total volume of items carried, multiplied by total gas consumed.

The basic idea: by some miracle, if your item was the only item on the truck, then you were responsible for all the gas it consumed.

If there were two items on the truck, your item and some other person's item, of equal size: then the two of you, are equally responsible for about half the gas consumed by the truck.

Of course: this is on average. If you wanted to be precise, you would have to consider things like optimal routing; it is very possible the second delivery could require the truck to travel extra distance it would not have to travel, otherwise.

For example: if you had a friend from down the road ship you an item, versus your next door neighbor who was having an item shipped from a few thousand miles away.

It is also oversimplistic to assume just one truck -- shipping companies use many trucks, they even have separate trucks for delivery VS trucks to transport items between shipping centers, as this is more efficient.

Re:Disagree

[hedwards]

If you happen to live in an apartment, that's largely the case. But not entirely, Fed Ex will always use at least 2 trucks to service a building in the US. One for Fed Ex ground and one for Fed Ex special, or whatever it is that they call their air unit.

Re:Disagree

[hedwards]

Which is why some retailers actually have multiple warehouses located throughout the country. Netflix and Gamefly are good examples, but Tigerdirect also does that and I'm sure that there's others. In fact shopatron makes that it's business model, handling and distributing orders based upon geography.

Re:Disagree

[gmhowell]

You have entirely ignored that shipping companies attempt to maximize loads, either by volume or by weight. Except in corner cases that do not apply in the general shipping of books and CDs from Amazon, you will not find situations such as you describe.

The portion you have bolded is called a 'marginal cost'.

Re:Disagree

[SydShamino]

But the postal service is more likely to upgrade to lower-energy fleet (CNG or some sort of electric thing) than each and every household is, making the concentration of energy consumption beneficial.

>> cardboard box and the plastic bubble wrap
>> I'd like to see some kind of reusable packaging.

Does not compute.

Re:Disagree

[SydShamino]

Without hard numbers in a specific situation it's difficult to say for certain, but I have to imagine that 1,000 trucks (10 boxes each), running a warmed engine, on a route designed to maximize efficiency, in a fleet vehicle that might already use CNG, has to be more efficient than 10,000 cars being cold started and driven three miles to a store and back.

Now, if those 10,000 cars are stopping off at a store on the way home, as a slight detour, then the incremental energy costs are probably minimal, and I'd agree with you.

Re:Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure you'll be popular with the freight companies with your discovery that freight in bulk is weightless. They'll be able to stop using heavy trucks, and will be able to change to smartcars to haul their trailers instead.

Re:Disagree

[Rakishi]

From there, maybe 10K relatively fuel efficient personal vehicles driving to the store is preferable to 10K commercial truck deliveries.

I'd seriously doubt that. Assuming some routing efficiency the trucks will travel only a fraction of the miles the cars do per package.

Re:Disagree

[dgatwood]

Fine, then only deliver packages on days when the person is getting junk mail anyway. That's at least three or four days a week.... :-)

But seriously, yeah, online shopping is much less efficient, if only because instead of transporting the goods crammed together with no extra packaging material, you're transporting them individually wrapped in extra protective packaging. It's the volume, not the weight, that makes individual shipping inefficient. It seems pretty obvious that internet shopping would be less efficient.

Also, instead of the product traveling from the manufacturer across the country to a store and then a few miles to your house, the product travels across country to an online store warehouse, then across the country again to your house. In the best case, the travel is comparable; in the worst case, the travel is doubled. Of course, much of this problem could be eliminated if manufacturers provided low-cost fulfillment services for their own products. Then an online store site could be merely a storefront, and could contact the manufacturer and have them ship the product directly to the customer. I've actually seen this done with some products (particularly products from Audio Technica), but this practice doesn't seem to be the norm. Most web stores use regional fulfillment warehouses, which may be closer to the retailers in terms of travel distance than if the web store had just one fulfillment warehouse, but it is still far less efficient than a full distribution network. Also, even if the manufacturer provided the fulfillment, it would still be less efficient unless that manufacturer shipped a whole pallet full of the product out at once---a delay that most online shoppers would not want to wait for.

What some folks don't realize about big box stores is that their stores (or trailers sitting behind their stores) can be used in part as temporary warehouse space for transporting goods to other stores. Imagine four stores, A, B, and C, in a line. You need to get a product from point A to point B and some of them to point C. You also have products that need to go from somewhere else (non-linear) to point C. So you run one truck from that second location to point B and drop off products. You then run a different truck from point A to point B, which drops off part of its load and picks up the additional goods before carrying everything to point D. Similarly, if there is extra space in the trucks, the central warehouses can preemptively ship extra products out that the store will eventually use. Those products sit in the truck until they are needed, and if another nearby store needs them, those products can be diverted locally instead of having to potentially run an extra truck from a central warehouse. In effect, this allows for much more distributed warehousing than is feasible with only a few warehouses scattered throughout the country.

Adding to the efficiency is the fact that most deliveries, fresh produce notwithstanding, are not time-dependent, unlike your package. If they get there a week later than expected, it's usually not a big deal; in the worst case, the store might be out of a product, but usually they keep ahead of things so that there is some wiggle room. What matters is minimizing the amount of distance that a product travels and filling every truckload as full as possible. The result is that delivery is highly efficient.

With individual package delivery, although some effort is made to do the same sorts of optimizations, the timeliness of the delivery limits the extent to which this is possible. Similarly, the inability to pre-distribute goods using otherwise wasted truck or plane space makes individual package delivery inherently less efficient.

Re:Disagree

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Fed Ex will always use at least 2 trucks to service a building in the US. One for Fed Ex ground and one for Fed Ex special, or whatever it is that they call their air unit.

Sounds like an artifact of them failing to fully integrated their 1998 acquisition of RPS which became "FedEx Ground." Prior to that they had little, if any, ground shipping. I remember how back around 2005 they were still operating off completely different computer systems and in many cases had different "hubs" for ground and air - sometimes just a few miles from each other.

Re:Disagree

[afidel]

Hybrid delivery vehicles don't make much sense or else UPS would have more than 250/20,000+ of their vehicles be hybrid. They're the guys that design routes to maximize right hand turns to reduce fuel consumption, if hybrid's were a panacea they would be doing it bigtime.

Re:Disagree

[tknd]

I'd like to see amazon and other online shops tape the product to the inside wall of a box. Literally just take that stupid plastic product container and a piece of shipping tap and stick it to the inside flap of a box. On the outside of the box say "don't cut here" on the side it is taped to and on the opposite side (safe side) say "open here".

Ok, it won't work for stuff in boxes or other adhesive unfriendly packaging. But for plastic shrink wrap crap that takes a beating to open, just tape it to the box.

Re:Disagree

[Chaos Incarnate]

Hell, they still have different paint schemes on the two types of trucks. Integrating their computer systems is still going to take another few decades, I think.

Re:Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah.. because bulk packaged stuff is filled to the brim on a trailer. Oh wait. it isn't. Pallets consume some of the space (5% or so?) and then they don't fill to the top of the trailer, although why exactly I don't know. But about 10% of the headroom on the trailer isn't used. So.. ~15% of that volume is wasted. Less volume wasted in the boxes, more volume wasted outside of them.

Also.. the cost of heating and cooling the stores isn't accounted for by you. But most products purchased by internet do not require temperature control (And good thing because couriers don't do temp controlled trucks).

Also, nobody schedules deliveries to be just in time anymore. So yeah, a week late delivery wouldn't screw a store's inventory over.. oh wait.. Not to mention that I don't know why you think merely being out of a product is no big deal. Shit, that means the customer drives to your store, looks for a product, can't find it, and then drives to another store to buy it. Not only do you not get a sale, but the customer incurs more travel costs (with the concurrent pollution emitted).

And lastly.. distribution trucks offloading stuff at a store, could but generally don't, fill all the space that they drop off at the store. That is wasted space and goes unused. Whereas the long haul trucks in the courier services are filled (or reach their push off time, whichever comes first) and head to their destination. At which point the trailers are offloaded and then refilled. They fill up in NYC and driver to Boston. Then fill up at Boston and head back to NYC.

If you're only going to pay attention to some of the downfalls of one option, all of the options of the other, then yeah. you'll always come out for one side you're viewing with rose glasses.

Re:Disagree

[russotto]

I remember how back around 2005 they were still operating off completely different computer systems and in many cases had different "hubs" for ground and air - sometimes just a few miles from each other.

They were still that way, at least as far as separate hubs, as late as last year. Probably separate computer systems still too; woe upon the customer who calls the regular FedEx number about a FedEx Ground package. (OK, not woe, but they won't be able to help you except to direct you to the FedEx Ground number)

Re:Disagree

[kent_eh]

I'd like to see some kind of reusable packaging.

Yeah. Something like cardboard boxes and bubble pack

As opposed to clamshells and form fitted foam pieces

Re:Disagree

[TheABomb]

No, as the counter-article hinted at, the real variable is the propensity of shoppers to drive to the store or to take mass public transit versus the use of a large freight truck to take the product to the store versus a much smaller postal vehicle to your house. The fact that the study was performed in England makes me doubt the applicability to myself as a Yank. (The American interstate highway system, and the fact that products ship from a warehouse possibly 3000 miles away directly to your door, with only a handoff between postal distribution centres versus the manufacturer's warehouse-to-X amount of store distribution centres-to-store warehouse-to-store-to-customer's home model is another variable that also probably is beyond the Limey researchers.)

Re:Disagree

[Jumperalex]

And lets not forget about the OTHER 10k vehicles traveling to the shore just to window shop or look for an item that isn't there so they go to ANOTHER store. Did they factor in the savings from the reduction in wasted trips vs. searching ten stores online, finding what I want, and then having it shipped to me? If they assumed a 1 to 1 replacement ratio for online vs brick-and-mortar purchases then they did it wrong. They must be friends with the RIAA's analysts ;-)

Re:Disagree

[shermo]

Assuming some routing efficiency the trucks will travel only a fraction of the miles the cars do per package.

Unfortunately Slashdot says we can't do that until someone proves P=NP

Re:Disagree

[Joe U]

Plus the freight trucks that move this crap across the country burn far less gas than if we all drove to the store. ~10,000 boxes carried in one truck is more efficient than 10,000 car trips.

And one train is far more efficient than all those trucks. Cross country shipping needs to be done properly.

Re:Disagree

[dgatwood]

Where to begin....

Yeah.. because bulk packaged stuff is filled to the brim on a trailer. Oh wait. it isn't. Pallets consume some of the space (5% or so?) and then they don't fill to the top of the trailer, although why exactly I don't know. But about 10% of the headroom on the trailer isn't used. So.. ~15% of that volume is wasted. Less volume wasted in the boxes, more volume wasted outside of them.

If a carrier is shipping individual packages across the country, I believe they usually put them on pallets for the long haul runs and fasten them down with cellophane or similar. Besides, even if the carrier does not use pallets, they're still not going to fill the truck all the way up. There are limits to how high you can stack things before the weight of the stack damages the packages at the bottom. In short, you have all the same problems when things are packed individually, plus all that wasted air space of the outer box that increases its volume anywhere from 20% (decent boxing) up to over a thousand percent (you'd be amazed) of the original volume.

Also.. the cost of heating and cooling the stores isn't accounted for by you. But most products purchased by internet do not require temperature control (And good thing because couriers don't do temp controlled trucks).

The store is likely to be there, for the most part, whether you choose to buy the product there or not. As such, that's basically a sunk cost and shouldn't really contribute to this discussion. The only way it would matter would be if there were so much mail ordering of products that the stores went out of business. And even if the stores went out of business, there are enough people who need to get products quickly that a store's closing would drive farther to other stores that are open, which means more fuel for a lot of people. That's likely to far outweigh any savings in energy due to not having to heat or cool the building. And if the last store in an area closed, people would start ordering products with next-day delivery, which usually requires shipping by air, which is extremely inefficient. I really can't imagine that you'd break even....

Also, nobody schedules deliveries to be just in time anymore. So yeah, a week late delivery wouldn't screw a store's inventory over.. oh wait.. Not to mention that I don't know why you think merely being out of a product is no big deal. Shit, that means the customer drives to your store, looks for a product, can't find it, and then drives to another store to buy it. Not only do you not get a sale, but the customer incurs more travel costs (with the concurrent pollution emitted).

Yes, but the impact is the opposite of what you think it will be. You're assuming that this means that if a delivery is delayed because of a truck not being full, a store runs out of something. In practice, if done correctly, because the entire shipment schedule is approximately known ahead of time, the delay of that non-full truck can be factored into the schedule, and the product can simply be put on an earlier truck. Thus, if a product's arrival is delayed because a truck isn't full, it is delayed because that product is not needed until after that truck is full. Otherwise, i would not have been on that truck, but rather, a previous truck. Alternatively, it might have taken a different route entirely.

The whole point of just-in-time deliveries is that you can not only reduce the products in warehouses, but also accurately predict your shipping needs to maximize efficiency. This level of planning simply cannot be matched by single one-off package delivery because a product cannot be shipped before you order it. As such, just-in-time deliveries actually widen the efficiency gap between local stores and mail order.

And lastly.. distribution trucks offloading stuff at a store, could but generally don't, fill all the space that they drop off at the st

Re:Disagree

[tftp]

And if your item is significantly heavy, for example, you are having a 500 pound lawnmower delivered, or say a really really big rock, it can have some increase in the gas consumption of the truck.

You can be sure that if I'm buying a 500 pound item I'm not picking it up in my car :-) It's coming on a truck with a lift gate or a forklift.

Re:Disagree

[Compaqt]

>But seriously, yeah, online shopping is much less efficient, if only because instead of transporting the goods crammed together with no extra packaging material, you're transporting them individually wrapped in extra protective packaging

The times I've bought books online, they've not come in 5 different boxes each with their own popcorn wrap, but rather 5 books in a single box.

Besides, what's the cost of maintaining a furnished showroom for books, with air conditioning, etc., instead of a single densely packed warehouse?

Re:Disagree

[DerekLyons]

The amount of gasoline consumed is directly proportional to the weight being carried.

A common misconception. Since her Suburban weighs around 5000 pounds the extra 2 pounds of my game or book make no measurable difference in the gasoline consumption. Put another way: Whether I carry 1 person or 4 persons in my car, I still get 35mpg regardless.

Just because your crude methods of measuring miles per gallon are unable to discern a difference, does not mean a difference does not exist. (Not to mention that if you always get 35MPG, that alone should raise a warning flag as to correctness of your calculations and method of measurement.)

Re:Disagree

[pjt33]

Is it talking about buying books or games? In the UK food shopping online is quite popular, and the major supermarkets have their own delivery vans.

Re:Disagree

[Karellen]

s/beyond/irrelevant to/

Re:Disagree

[ensignyu]

Well, I don't send packages nearly as often as I receive them, and I don't know anyone who takes them other than recycling. So they're not really reusable in a practical sense. I've got more them than I can find a use for.

You can refill plastic water bottles too, but most people don't.

I was thinking "reusable" more along the lines of http://tote.amazon.com/

Re:Disagree

[JohnnyBGod]

Nonsense. "Some routing efficiency" != "Routing optimality"

Re:Disagree

[xaxa]

The American interstate highway system

In case you weren't aware, we have roads like that in the UK too. We call them motorways, drive on the left side, and the signs are blue rather than green, but they're otherwise the same ;-)

The study is from the IET, the article says "It also highlights that working from home can increase home energy use by as much as 30 per cent, and can lead to people moving further from the workplace, stretching urban sprawl and increasing pollution." -- I think you've gone way past this point in the USA, so the study really isn't relevant.

Re:Disagree

[xaxa]

I'm assuming that a good deal of the online purchases in the UK come from outside of the UK, so it makes a bit more sense.

Only in a very few cases, e.g. you can buy slightly cheaper DVDs and CDs from Jersey/Guernsey (play.com etc -- it's a useful tax haven for them), and there are a couple of stores selling high-value small electronics from the Continent (e.g. pixmania.co.uk is in France, I think, and the VAT saving helps their prices). Both run English language websites with prices in £.

Most other things will be bought from a UK online retailer. I expect there's a lot more online shopping being shipped out of the UK (e.g. to France, Germany etc).

Re:Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

There's one more variable: The goods you order online use more packaging material than the ones you pick up at the store. There are apparently some products available at amazon where you can opt out of the shiny sales packaging and get a plain cardboard box instead, but that will still go with some bubblewrap or similar protection into another carton for shipment.

Re:Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

If you include driving to 10 shops before finding one that actually has the product in stock, the numbers become even more skewed.
If all shops had a website that described exactly all there products, there price and how many they have on stock, you could get away with driving to just one shop. But if shops go that far, they usually make it possible to order items on-line as well.

Re:Disagree

[drinkypoo]

But the postal service is more likely to upgrade to lower-energy fleet (CNG or some sort of electric thing) than each and every household is, making the concentration of energy consumption beneficial.

probably not true, the USPS is broke. DHL just went out of business so clearly there's not that much margin in the shipping business, so I wouldn't look for UPS to replace their diesels any time soon. Fedex either, although they seem to have more gassers. I love when I get a fedex truck and a fedex express van on the same day.

Re:Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

Studies like these really need software developers to write software that can measure EVERY factor for this sort of thing in real time for the real activities. There should be a framework for this since there are many things that our society needs to be able to track multiple factors on. The framework should also allow for extending the factors as new ones are found. And it should all be done in real time so that these studies get replaced with hard data about what's really happening... everywhere. Screw privacy since we're trying to save the world here. The data can be sanitized of identifying information, but we should still know how many dildos our wives and girlfriends are ordering per year and just how many batteries that works out to. It could save the planet.

Re:Disagree

[moonbender]

It's something like T_p-w1 + T_w1-s + T_s-c versus T_p-w2 + T_w2-d + T_d-c, where T is transport cost, p is producer, w is a wholesaler, d is delivery company and c is the consumer. Most people including you argue that T_d-c is close to zero since a mail truck drives by their house, anyway. Well, for one thing, mail isn't transported in a truck where I live (and that may be true for the UK, as well). And T_s-c (transport store-customer) really is free since nearly all stores are within walking distance. I'm sure the logistics for groceries are just about as efficient as they can possibly get, and it stands to reason that the more general problem of package logistics can't be solved in an equally efficient manner.

That aside, all factors can vary, it's more complicated than the Slashdot groupthink seems to assume.

Re:Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the stupidest thing I've ever read in my 13 years on Slashdot. Every change in weight affects how much gasoline is consumed. Add a person, use a fraction more gasoline. QED (if you're not a buffoon). You're thinking in rounding numbers off. But I suspect you don't appreciate rounding numbers off that are not in your favor when money is involved... Dolt.

Re:Disagree

[drinkypoo]

Hybrid delivery vehicles don't make much sense or else UPS would have more than 250/20,000+ of their vehicles be hybrid.

Hybrid power systems don't work on large scales. We're not that good at building them yet. But on mail trucks, as the GP suggested, they'd work fine, because they're not such large vehicles. (We have one antique jeep, a few of those postal vans, one impreza, and a handful of other vehicles delivering the mail in my county...)

Re:Disagree

[garwain]

Agreed. The online store I buy from is shipping out a large stack of orders every day. The courrier service doesn't send a truck to pick up each package as soon as you order it, all orders for the day (or X time period) go out at once. Then the packages move through distribution points along with X billion other packages, so even if there is only my 1 box coming to my area from the supplier, there is probably a truck full of other packages from other suppliers shipping to other people in my area. I have an added bonus that I work directly across from the main shipping company's regional office, so they just hold my packages, and call me to let me know they are there (which with internet tracking, I usually know before they call), then I pick up whatever when I'm on my way home from work, so I burn no extra fuel, the transport company only burns the fuel to move the product around, which is marginal considering the bulk nature of transport. Food is the one thing I don't understand. Why would I want to purchase all sorts of stuff from the opposite corner of the continant, when the food is also grown locally. California blue berries on the shelf when Lac Saint-jean is only a few hours away, and the quality of their berries is much better?

Re:Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

Put another way: Whether I carry 1 person or 4 persons in my car, I still get 35mpg regardless.

Wow! That's one amazing car you've got! Not only is gas and maintenance costs so negligible that you don't have to count it in your monthly/weekly budget, it can take an extra 600 lbs of weight with zero change in gas consumption!

Re:Disagree

[sco08y]

A certain percentage of its trip is attributable to your item.

It really is amazing how many people on this thread can't grasp this concept.

Re:Disagree

[dgatwood]

The times I've bought books online, they've not come in 5 different boxes each with their own popcorn wrap, but rather 5 books in a single box.

Books are easy. They're not particularly fragile, and people mostly buy them several at a time, even dozens at a time. That makes them very much not normal when it comes to online shopping. Most online shopping is for high ticket items like electronics. In that space, most people don't buy a whole bunch of things together unless they buy a bundle, and electronics need a lot more protection during shipping.

Besides, what's the cost of maintaining a furnished showroom for books, with air conditioning, etc., instead of a single densely packed warehouse?

This isn't about costs. It's about pollution. Most of a business's costs have nothing to do with pollution. The cost of renting space, the cost of having more employees, etc. have minimal impact on pollution. (Yes, the employees use gas to get to work, but that's a drop in the bucket.)

Again, books are not the norm. There's a great deal more product differentiation in books than in most other product lines. When you can't get a particular brand of soap, you buy a different one. You probably don't drive to another store to get that brand, and you certainly don't drive very far. One book is not equivalent to another in the same way. This requires significant floor space for products that won't get purchased for years at a time. This greatly inflates the square footage needed for bookstores, and thus their environmental impact.

Books are also just about the only area where stores encourage customers to make special requests. This means that many bookstores get many of their goods in fairly small quantities. There is minimal difference between shipping two or three copies of a single book to a bookstore and shipping two or three different books from a warehouse directly to the customer.

So yes, books are an exception where online shopping actually might be better for the environment. I'd expect it to depend on the size of the store, their special order rate, and whether they sell used books. (The efficiency of selling used books locally would likely tip the environmental balance in favor of the local store when compared with online sales.) Again, though, books are an exception precisely because of their nature and the inherent difficulty in stocking sufficient breadth of products at a local store. Although you might see that same pattern in other highly specialized areas (e.g. professional video gear), it isn't typical of the online-versus-store debate. Most of those sorts of specialty shops have long since gone out of business outside of major metropolitan areas because there just isn't enough of a market for them to be viable. I'm almost surprised bookstores still exist for the same reason. Give it ten years, and this exception may be gone, too. :-)

Re:Disagree

[Grishnakh]

You're assuming that there's a store nearby with the goods that you want already shipped there. What if it's out-of-stock (a common occurrence at B&M stores)? What if it's only carried at a different store, because this one is one of their smaller stores? How much gas (and time) do you have to burn driving around looking for the thing you're looking for, instead of just buying it online and not dealing with all that hassle?

It's even worse if you live in a small town or rural area.

Re:Disagree

[Rakishi]

http://xkcd.com/664/

Re:Disagree

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

You're right - so it's 10,000 car trips, PLUS one truck.

Re:Disagree

[Grishnakh]

Packing material is still generally more energy-efficient than tons of short trips by individuals to various stores in their personal car (or worse, 12 mpg SUV).

Plus, you can easily reuse packing material, or take it to your local shipment stores for them to reuse. And cardboard is easily recyclable; we put it in our blue curbside containers here.

Re:Disagree

[Grishnakh]

Wrong. These are wheeled ground vehicles, not airplanes. Extra weight has little effect on a truck or car (to a certain point); it's a nonlinear relationship. Even in my lightweight 2600-lb. car, adding two extra people has a pretty insignificant effect on fuel economy. A 5-pound package will make zero difference.

If you were talking about airplanes, you'd have a point. Extra weight on a plane has a much more significant effect on its fuel economy (or even its ability to take off). The effect is even more pronounced in helicopters. In a small helicopters like an R-22, you have to be careful where you place 20 pounds of cargo because it affects the aircraft's balance, and you have to do calculations for it before your flight to make sure you're safe.

Re:Disagree

[Grishnakh]

It's a nonlinear increase. 5 pounds of extra weight in a 5000lb vehicle will not make a measurable difference in fuel economy, and neither will adding a person. In an old 1500lb Mini Cooper, perhaps, but not a modern mail-carrying vehicle. If you were talking about aircraft, you'd be correct.

Air resistance is definitely a much larger factor than a small increase in weight.

Re:Disagree

[Grishnakh]

Well, the way things are today, the USPS would probably be glad for any extra business, because they're currently suffering. So I don't think extra room in the mail trucks is an issue currently.

As for packaging, you can save bubble wrap and reuse it for your own shipments, or for packing for your next move. Besides, recycling is still better than everyone making wasteful trips to stores just to buy one item (or worse, to look for an item and find it's not there). Overall, I think online shopping is far more efficient than shopping locally, at least for smaller (easily shipped) goods, in cases where you're only likely to buy one or two things on a trip. The places where local beats online is for 1) groceries (because of perishability and because you usually buy many items at once, all at the same store), 2) for things like Lowe's/Home Depot, where you need items that are typically stocked and prefer not to wait a week to get your toilet fixed, and 3) for very heavy or bulky items, like appliances, where long-distance shipping is prohibitively expensive.

Re:Disagree

[Grishnakh]

Granted, the reason most of us shop online is because it can be ridiculously cheaper.

It's ridiculously cheaper because it's far more efficient.

You mentioned packaging, but you totally left out how much energy and money it takes to maintain a retail store, for A/C, lighting, and staff. You don't need most of that with a warehouse in Montana that serves the entire country. The staffing for online stores is far less than B&M stores, saving tons of money, and the energy usage is much less per product too, as is the real estate space consumed (warehouses don't need fancy displays, or to be located in expensive places). If you want to see really wasteful energy usage, look at a shopping mall.

There's no way extra packaging comes close to comparing to the energy usage of a B&M storefront.

However, there are places where shopping online is NOT ridiculously cheaper. Grocery stores, for one, and places like Home Depot and Lowe's. If I need a toilet flapper valve (a common repair item), there's no way it would be cheaper to buy it online than to just drive to my local Lowe's. But things like electronics are generally very overpriced in B&M stores, because of the factors I mentioned, and the fact that electronics stores don't do anywhere near the sales volume that grocery and home-improvement stores do. Supermarkets, for instance, only have about 3 days' worth of stock on-hand, from what I've heard. If they stopped receiving new deliveries from their suppliers, they'd have bare shelves in 3 days or less; that's a good indicator of efficiency there. Your local Best Buy doesn't empty its shelves nearly that quickly.

Re:Disagree

[Grishnakh]

For large-scale distribution, cross-country shipping typically IS done by train.

Re:Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

At something like 100L/100km highway efficiency, you don't want that truck doing stop-start work.

(Captcha: Chewer)

Re:Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

Many NP-complete problems are actually pretty easy to approximate, sometimes even with provable bounds. For example, submodular functions (eg optimal sensor placement) can actually be computed in a way that guarantees that the value chosen is at least 63% of optimal.

Even halt, an /uncomputable/ problem in general, can frequently be solved on a given program of sufficient simplicity (IE, nothing actually useful in real life, but still fairly complex toys)

Re:Disagree

[SydShamino]

UPS diesels are likely already pretty efficient, and if there's money to be saved upgrading them, they'll do it. Truck replacement has to already be part of the their budget, so this isn't some large optional infrastructure expense.

I'd love to see *all* the assumptions they make

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably something like a delivery truck's entire trip is dedicated to YOUR package.

Watch this be used...

[oDDmON oUT]

For a "pollution" tax on online transactions, since sales taxes still fail to pass muster.

After all, "It's for the planet".

Re:Watch this be used...

[ScottCooperDotNet]

Why is this a troll?

Really, what is my State Attorney General's office going to do to help with something out of state? Chuckle and say "contact the AG in that state" probably. So why should I be paying sales tax?

And on top of that there are also local taxes, some of which cannot be calculated by ZIP code. So there is additional cost for these online stores to deal with because the government doesn't feel its current taxation methods are sufficient.

Re:Watch this be used...

[shermo]

Or we could tax petrol in accordance with its environmental impact and let people choose the best method for their own situation. If petrol cost (say) 3-4 times the current amount people would choose the option that inflicted the least amount of damage on the environment because it would be the cheapest.

Note this comment has no basis in reality.

Re:Watch this be used...

[azaris]

Why is this a troll?

Because anyone who points out that modern greens have abandoned real convervationism for made-up issues like CO2 "pollution" gets modded a troll on /. nowadays.

Re:Watch this be used...

[Grishnakh]

Gasoline (and diesel for trucks) isn't the only thing that determines damage to the environment. How about an extra tax on commercial use of energy, especially for air conditioning and lighting? After all, that's something the retail stores use a lot of, and internet-shop warehouses use little to none of. Why should the internet shops be penalized by the fact that all their energy use is in fuel for shipping, while retail stores get a free pass for wasting enormous amounts of energy maintaining storefronts? Do you have any idea how much electricity a typical shopping mall uses?

This is the problem with government and taxation; governments use taxes to implement social policy, but of course they do it badly, and end up making it much cheaper to do things that are more harmful long-term. A good example of this is the US government's tax breaks and subsidies for growing corn, along with their high taxes on sugar.

Re:Watch this be used...

[shermo]

Definitely, coal plants that spew pollutants into the air at no cost to themselves would be taxed.

Do you have any idea how much electricity a typical shopping mall uses?

In the electricity example, I propose that it's better to tax further up the chain where the environmental harm is done, not at the end user. Taxing at the end user is much much harder to get 'right', and the environmental impact of coal plants is better understood.

So, tax the polluting electricity plants, then the cost of electricity should more closely reflect real environmental impact, and malls can make their own decision on whether paying for lighting is worth it.

As a side benefit you do away with all the complex 'renewable' energy subsidies since all the different technologies compete on equal terms.

Re:Watch this be used...

[Grishnakh]

I think the taxation should be done based on the harm to the environment: thus, coal/oil plants would get high taxes, nuclear plants lower taxes, and solar plants zero taxes. Then the large electricity consumers can decide who they want to buy power from, or if they'd prefer to install a big solar array on their roof (malls have tons of wasted roof space!). Apply similar and proportional taxes to fuel (again, gasoline gets a higher tax, CNG gets a little lower tax, and EVs get zero tax (though they're still paying taxes that are passed on to them from the electric utility). This would all finally work out to tax people evenly based on their impact to the environment, and will show up in the form of pricing. Then, we'll see which solutions are more environmentally-friendly based on how much they cost: if online shopping is more efficient, as I believe, then prices (+shipping) will be cheaper than for shopping locally (though consumers still need to factor in their own costs for fuel, car maintenance, and time). Of course, what's most likely to happen is online shopping will be much cheaper for certain markets, and not cheaper for other markets (like groceries).

Of course, sales taxes skew this equation somewhat, and there's a continuing argument whether online stores should charge taxes at all. Personally, I don't believe they should, because they don't make use of any government services local to the buyer. If the local government needs money for schools, they should be getting that money from property taxes, which the buyer pays (either directly, if a homeowner, or indirectly through rent if a renter).

Re:Watch this be used...

[shermo]

Yeah that's exactly what I was trying to say. Glad you could phrase it a bit better than I was.

On a tangent, the concept of buying electricity from one particular source has always annoyed me. If you're connected to the grid, you're making use of all the ancillary services connected to the grid - whether they're provided by thermal, nuclear, hydro, wind or whatever.

It's like people who buy as much energy from wind generation as they use and then claim that they only use clean green wind power. This is clearly not the case since when wind isn't generating they are being supported by thermal generation.

We actually have a power company here who claims 'clean green' energy, since they only have hydro and wind generation plant. However, they regularly have more demand from customers (who bought into the nonsense) than they generate. Guess where the difference comes from? It's not clean or green.

Re:Watch this be used...

[Grishnakh]

Unfortunately, I don't really see any way of having true competition in electric power service, without having many sets of power lines running to every home and business. That's why it's something that works better as a heavily regulated monopoly. It's really up to the voters to do a better job picking politicians that regulate these companies better.

What do assumptions do again?

[Chmcginn]

Not having the actual study, it's hard to say, but it seems like there's some big assumptions here.

For instance:

It also highlights that working from home can increase home energy use by as much as 30 per cent, and can lead to people moving further from the workplace, stretching urban sprawl and increasing pollution.

Sure, it's going to increase home electric usage. One would hope, though, that the employer doesn't keep all the equipment running - which means the majority of that is just being shifted, not created anew. As far as increasing pollution from transportation, that I don't get at all. Suppose I work from home three days a week. To spend the same amount on driving, I'd need to move two and a half times as far away. And even then, I probably wouldn't, since it would mean more highway miles and less downtown miles. How many people are going to move from a twenty-mile commute to a fifty-mile commute just because they're working from home Tuesday - Thursday this year?

And if the employer set up the work-from-home program permanently, they can get a smaller building since they know 60% or more or staff is home every non-meeting day. So then there's likely very little extra electric usage.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[commodore64_love]

>>>which means the majority of that is just being shifted, not created anew.

And even if the electricity did go up, the overall *energy* usage would be less than moving a ~4000 pound vehicle across ~50 miles (typical american commute). Moving electrons across wires is far more energy efficient than moving people back-and-forth to work. Staying home uses FAR less energy overall.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[Chmcginn]

And even if the electricity did go up, the overall *energy* usage would be less than moving a ~4000 pound vehicle across ~50 miles (typical american commute).

Exactly. Although, I think maybe that was part of their 'this was in Britain, so YMMV' statement at the end.

If the average upper-middle-class British commute is much shorter, it could drive up transportation costs. If they originally lived two miles from the workplace when it was five days a week, and then when it became a once-a-week deal, they got a house 25 miles away, it might create more pollution than you saved. But most Americans who work jobs that can be telecommuted to already live quite a few miles away, so assuming they're going to move much further without some good evidence that is the case is silly.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[seebs]

I don't buy this "urban sprawl" thing. Yes, I work far from my office. About 25 miles, I think. I dunno; I go there maybe once a month.

Instead, I live in a small town, about six blocks from the grocery store, which I walk to nearly every day. I need to pick up prescriptions? I walk to the drug store. Wanna browse the used bookstore? I walk there. Going out for lunch? I walk.

Trips up to the Big City to go shopping are isolated, and we go two or three places on a single trip.

When I lived in a city, nicely centrally located and all that, we drove about 15k miles a year, now we drive maybe 3k if that. Now, the cost of getting goods here may be slightly higher -- but that's all highly efficient rail or big semis, which are costing a lot less than hundreds of individual grocery trips.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[blair1q]

Assumptions cover your ass. Especially if you state them in the introduction to your paper.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[SydShamino]

There are plenty of places that don't have a grocery store, book store, or drug store within walking distance. In our town, I've seen someone get up in front of the planning and zoning commission and complain about the city's attempts to attract retail, because if they wanted to live near commercial things they would have moved somewhere else. I've seen one of our council members say "I like sprawl. I make my living on sprawl." as he had wording about walkable neighborhoods and easy access to nearby conveniences strickened from the comprehensive plan. (He's a home builder.)

There are a lot of better people in town, and most of us want what you have, but getting businesses in the door to do so aren't easy. I expect your town is pretty old and most of the businesses have long ago amortized their capital costs. The same isn't true if the nearby commercial space is green field and you have to convince a drug store to build from scratch.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[adaviel]

Not having the actual study, it's hard to say, but it seems like there's some big assumptions here.

http://www.theiet.org/factfiles/transport/unintended-page.cfm

Looks like it's a meta-study; it seems to quote this: http://is4ie.net/images/Matthews.pdf, quoted by someone else, which is a 2001 study from the US. Also this: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1162/108819802763471816/pdf - a study of online book retailing in Japan in 2001.

I may have got this all wrong, and there may be some new UK research I didn't find.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I don't buy this "urban sprawl" thing. Yes, I work far from my office. About 25 miles, I think. I dunno; I go there maybe once a month.

If you have a job where you can telecommute, great, enjoy it. Most people (who have jobs at all, that is) still have to go in to work five days a week, and most of the time, that means driving. Don't pretend your situation is typical.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[lxs]

Only five days a week? Lucky sods.
Next you'll tell me that they only work eight hours a day!

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[JohnnyBGod]

Ah! The wonders of single-use zoning!... In most places I've been to, the way it actually works is that the ground floor gets used for commerce, while the rest of the building is residential.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[xaxa]

Is that 50 miles each way?

In the UK, "The average daily commute is 8.7 miles", but I'm not sure if that's just drivers (RAC study, so it probably is).

Only (?) "one in four [rail commuters] considered it wasted time", which might increase the average distance. (I assume most car drivers consider their commute wasted time and would prefer it to be shorter) Hundreds of thousands of people commute into London by train, which is automatically at least 20 miles (radius of London).

Upper middle class commutes probably vary a lot: some will be living in a luxury flat in the middle of the city and will use public transport to get to work (or walk), but others will have bought a big house in the countryside somewhere. In the south east they'll walk (or ride a fold-up bicycle) to the village station and take the train to London, elsewhere they'll probably drive all the way. And others will have bought a big town house a little further from the edge of the city.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[xaxa]

I think the biggest thing will be heating usage, but the same applies to lighting and cooking.

I'm at work, so my house is currently not heated. If I worked from home I'd put the heating on -- but the office would still need to be heated. Even if everyone worked from home (no office), heating 500 homes takes a lot more energy that heating a couple of office buildings.

But, not everyone can work from home (they need the physical stuff that's here), so at least some office space will always be needed.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[stewbacca]

For instance:

It also highlights that working from home can increase home energy use by as much as 30 per cent, and can lead to people moving further from the workplace, stretching urban sprawl and increasing pollution.

Err, if I work from home, why does being "further from the workplace" matter? Seriously, this is WHY I live so damned far away from downtown Austin. I can get a giant cheap house 30 miles away from downtown. Even when I do have to go into town, the cost savings from my mortgage alone offset any transportation costs.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[stewbacca]

I lived in England, and being American, opted for living arrangements like I'm used to in the US. That is to say we had a big house out in the country and opted to drive into Harrogate. The MAIN problem with applying this US-centric mentality to living in Europe is not gas prices (although they are shocking at first) and not the commute, but what to do when you get to your destination. Parking is a serious problem (and seriously expensive).

So it isn't congestion, crappy roads, or expensive gas that made commuting a pain in the ass, it was the lack of parking. When we went to Cambridge, they had an elegant solution of parking on the outskirts then riding a bus into town.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[seebs]

I wouldn't dream of pretending that it's typical.

I was addressing, however, one of the key circumstances which makes ordering online relevant -- I'm not usually near stores.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[Grishnakh]

I think the discussion was about a comment that telecommuting supposedly increases energy usage by encouraging sprawl. It's not about people who drive to work 5 days a week.

The parent refuted this idea with his anecdote about living in a small town far from work, where he rarely drives to work, but for everything else, his amenities are within walking distance. I tend to agree. If I didn't have to drive to work, my energy usage would go way down since I would only need to leave my home for groceries and the like, and wouldn't have to waste so much gas just commuting back and forth every day.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[Grishnakh]

I'm at work, so my house is currently not heated. If I worked from home I'd put the heating on -- but the office would still need to be heated. Even if everyone worked from home (no office), heating 500 homes takes a lot more energy that heating a couple of office buildings.

I'm not so sure. Depending on your climate, you need to heat your home to a certain extent all day long, or else your pipes will freeze. Secondly, you can't let it get too cold, or it'll be unreasonably cold inside when you get home. Thirdly, if you live with anyone else (esp. a stay-at-home mom), you need the heat on when they're at home. The incremental cost of heating your home for you to stay there all day probably isn't that much (esp. since heating costs less during the day--just open your windows to get some free solar heat, plus daytime temps are higher).

Anyway, eliminating the cost of fuel needed for commuting should more than make up for any extra heating costs. 500 people driving 3500-pound cars to and from work every day consumes a lot of fuel.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. Who ever made that claim is obviously some kind of person who wants everyone to live in giant, ultra-dense metropolises with 4 families per apartment.

If you don't have to drive to work any more, then the whole "sprawl" thing becomes a non-issue. Sprawl is only a problem when people are commuting back and forth to work. Without having to drive to work, many people will move to smaller towns and communities where housing is cheaper and traffic is better, and when they do go out (for groceries or restaurants and such), they'll go to places near their new home. It's not like they're going to drive 30 miles into town just to get groceries three times a week.

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[xaxa]

Again, the survey was done in Britain.

Hardly any British people need to keep a house heated while they're away. Hardly anywhere does it get so cold that you need the heating on before you get home, though it might be more comfortable. In any case, you simply set the timer so the heating starts 15/30 minutes before you get home, there's no point leaving it on all day.

The average British car uses 6.2L/100km, the average commute is 28km (round trip). That's 1.7 litres of fuel (of course, plenty of people don't drive to work). I can't find any decent figures for heating, but people with oil heating (not very common) seem to use well over 2L per day (e.g. here, and he's presumably trying to save money).

P.S. Opening your windows loses heat. Glass lets the solar radiation in, but traps the heated air. Hence the "greenhouse effect".

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[Grishnakh]

P.S. Opening your windows loses heat. Glass lets the solar radiation in, but traps the heated air. Hence the "greenhouse effect".

Yes, that's why I said you should open your windows (sorry, I meant the blinds, not the windows themselves; that would be dumb).

Re:What do assumptions do again?

[SydShamino]

We allow this now in our zoning code (I'm on the zoning commission and have influenced the rewrite), but now we have to find developers who will "risk" doing this sort of project. They are all scared and want to make yet another cookie-cutter parking-lot-and-pad-site development as its the easiest path to a paycheck.

Postal Service

[failedlogic]

The biggest 'environmental' problem IMO the "failed delivery attempt" to many residential locations ... much wated gas. They should just setup a few centralized pickup locations in urbanized areas (provided, of course, the real estate is available and 'cheap' enough to keep rates low).

What I don't understand is why the post office (at least Canada Post) and the major shippers UPS, FedEX must make a delivery to your house should you order something. I can see they want to make sure you exist and that you have an address. Most people work and its not always practical to have goods delivered to work.

I've had a few things shipped with UPS and FedEX - low dollar value e.g. under $200. When I wasn't available to pickup it was a huge headache to get them to drop off at an alternate location. I live in a major city and their pickup/warehouse place is next to the airport - a good 40 minute commute.

Re:Postal Service

[compro01]

What I don't understand is why the post office (at least Canada Post) and the major shippers UPS, FedEX must make a delivery to your house should you order something

As far as I know, they aren't. I hardly ever have anything delivered to my door unless it was shipped via Purolator (Their truck drives right past my house every weekday at 4pm). Anything sent via UPS I can pick up at the courier office (which is about 30 minutes away, or I can wait til they send a truck out my way on Thursdays), whereas Fedex punts to Canada Post for delivery, and it ends up in my mailbox.

OTOH, I'm in Saskatchewan and live in a tiny village, so YMMV.

Re:Postal Service

[icebraining]

Here in Portugal we have plenty of post offices, at least in the cities, and if the package is large enough for the mailman to know it won't fit in the box (depends on the mailman - some won't deliver any package, even small), they'll just write a notice card and let you pickup the package at the post office.

Re:Postal Service

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, this is Canada, buddy.

YKMV.

Re:Postal Service

[fnj]

Jeeze, did you guys never hear about signing a waiver so UPS and Fedex just leave the package at your door when you're not home? This is what everybody I know does. As for wasting gas, the truck has to drive down the main highway, 1 mile from where I live, anyway, so next to no gas is used to make the jog to my house. I MUCH prefer UPS and Fedex to the postal service, which makes me drive to the post office, wasting far more gas, to check the P. O. box.

As for the post office, everybody I know just has a post office box, so they just hold it there, about 2 miles from home. Of course your mileage may vary.

Re:Postal Service

[GiMP]

I have the odd problem of being home, but not owning a car. This results in naive drivers which never knock or ring the bell, they just leave a "sorry you weren't home" notice. If I'm home, I won't sign a waiver, since there is no reason for them to leave expensive packages outside. Yay for suburban sprawl!

Re:Postal Service

[failedlogic]

yeah, its a nice option and I would choose it if I didn't live in a downtown apartment. :)

Re:Postal Service

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people work and its not always practical to have goods delivered to work.

On the contrary, I've found that it's usually more practical to have goods delivered to work. If I have things delivered to home, there may or may not be someone there to receive the goods, and if not they might be left at the doorstep (people nicking things left on the doorstop is something I'm a tad paranoid about) or held at the post office, and work schedules can mean not being able to get there during open hours any time soon after delivery, sometimes up to a week. Whereas if I have things delivered to work, it's guaranteed there's someone there to receive it, and there's at most two days between delivery and me physically having the goods.

Your mileage may vary depending on your circumstances of course. But outside of furniture and large appliance delivery (which I'd take the day off to organise anyway), I can't picture any circumstances where it's impractical to have goods delivered to work.

Re:Postal Service

[CheshireCatCO]

The biggest 'environmental' problem IMO the "failed delivery attempt" to many residential locations ... much wated gas. They should just setup a few centralized pickup locations in urbanized areas (provided, of course, the real estate is available and 'cheap' enough to keep rates low).

Which gets dangerously close to just making a brick-and-mortar store. One of the main reasons I find people order online is not wanting to or not being (easily) able to get to such central locations as stores. My girlfriend, for example, doesn't have a car and therefore orders almost everything online, to be delivered to her house.

Actually, in as much as this pretty much permits her to live without a car, I'd argue that it's decreasing her environmental footprint.

Re:Postal Service

[compro01]

This is Saskatchewan, buddy.

We measure distance in minutes.

Re:Postal Service

[Anonymous Coward]

What I don't understand is why the post office (at least Canada Post) and the major shippers UPS, FedEX must make a delivery to your house should you order something. I can see they want to make sure you exist and that you have an address. Most people work and its not always practical to have goods delivered to work.

I've had a few things shipped with UPS and FedEX - low dollar value e.g. under $200. When I wasn't available to pickup it was a huge headache to get them to drop off at an alternate location. I live in a major city and their pickup/warehouse place is next to the airport - a good 40 minute commute.

I'm a UPS driver. We deliver to the address on the label. If you don't want it delivered to your house, and you can't have it delivered to your work, and it's too far to drive to go pick it up at the hub, just give me your name and address and next time I have a package for you I'll just toss it in the ditch and you can pick it up there.

It's not hard to have it rerouted. You can call. You can go online. Hell, you can leave a note on your door, and you'll get it the next day as long as we don't screw up (1 time out of about 22, on average).

Re:Postal Service

[Anonymous Coward]

Bruce??? Is that you??? Hey, don't forget to turn off the lights when you leave...

Re:Postal Service

[teh kurisu]

I've had this problem before. When I'm home and waiting for a delivery and the weather is good, I've taken to just leaving my door open, which is a good indication that I'm in.

Re:Postal Service

[Bobb Sledd]

No. That wouldn't help.

You're just shifting the energy cost to the customer, and if (for example) you have two customers that are neighbors, you just doubled your inefficiency because you essentially required two delivery trips where one would have sufficed by delivery route.

UPS/FedEx generally have an efficient route. I know in my neighborhood, I can guess when the UPS man is going to drive by, everyday.

Re:Postal Service

[jabbathewocket]

Except that the truck was already there unless you live seriously outside the norm the major carriers all move through every street in america every single day they operate.. you can say they waste time/energy/gas stopping the truck getting out and waiting for you to answer the door..

its not a "special 20 mile trip out of the distribution center just for your package" its just one more stop on the endless route that they do every day..

The reason for the requirement for signature/delivery to the billing address is not the shippers its the sellers/credit card companies who used to get hammered with mass fraud..

Re:Postal Service

[Ritchie70]

All the delivery companies play "ding-dong-ditch" with my packages - ring the door bell, dump 'em on the porch, and go. I've never signed any sort of waiver. The one time I put out a note because I thought they might require a signature it just confused them.

I bought something off Apple once and they required a signature - and shipped via Fed Ex Ground I think. What a pain in the ass that was to deal with. Real FedEx is great. FedEx Ground sucks. I will never accept them as a shipping option again.

Sadly, for a while there UPS and FedEx both were switching my packages and one of my (up the street) neighbors. I live at 13W512 Lundberg Place. The neighbors are at 3S512 Lundberg Avenue. I understand the mistake, but it gets tiresome walking a block and stealing your package off your neighbor's porch (or dropping theirs off.) They mostly stopped after I called and yelled at them about leaving a couple thousand dollars worth of merchandise on the wrong damn porch.

Compromise

[T Murphy]

So what if I go to the store and have them order stuff online for me from there? Does it all cancel out and create zero pollution?

Re:Compromise

[Yvan256]

Better than that, the pollution from the factories actually goes back in!

So if anyone orders something online that ends up smelling like smoke, it's T Murphy's fault.

The world "may" end tomorrow.

[kurokame]

The problem here is that many potential scenarios are being reduced to a blanket statement in the media.

Two examples.

Say I live a block from a major chain grocer. They have trucks coming and going to deliver their produce and other stock, which pollute at some rate. Now say I can either walk a block and buy a bag of carrots, or I can order one from their delivery service. If I walk, I'm polluting at whatever rate corresponds to a human walking - pretty low, probably around what it would be if I was just sitting at home doing nothing, and slightly beneficial to my health. If I order it, a truck picks up a batch of groceries from the store and then drives to my home and several others. For this, it's probably true that the second case has a significant pollution margin compared to the first case. This does not make the second case a major pollutant source, just one which is likely greater than the first case.

Now say I want to order a mattress. I could rent a van, go driving around to several mattress shops, and drive my purchase home. Alternately, I could use public transit to visit several stores and then have one delivered in a truck along with several other deliveries. Maybe the truck is diesel and the van uses unleaded. Okay...it's probably true that the truck pollutes less than if everyone it's delivering to drives to the store themselves.

What the heck are they comparing here? All in-person purchases to all online purchases? All deliveries? Yes, I chose extremes - because they're a good way to illustrate that the article is making some unsupportable blanket statements. If the question is buying a shirt from Target versus getting it online...well, it's harder to say which is better. Using a car probably pollutes more than delivery or public transit - one engine tends to be less wasteful than dozens. But of the remaining two? Okay, the bus was going there with or without you, but the FedEx truck was driving its route with or without you as well. Maybe the difference isn't all that large.

The bigger problem here is that modern environmentalism is riddled with this sort of irresponsible reporting. Did it arise from the media article or from the researchers? Who knows. Both have been known to be guilty of this, although it's often the simple case of journalists being given topics to report on which they lack the competency to interpret accurately. But FUD and panic aren't going to save the planet.

Re:The world "may" end tomorrow.

[SleazyRidr]

Indeed, there are a lot of different factors that you'd have to take into account. Also, as you said there are some different situations that could lead to different results. I would be hard work to try and figure it all out. Lucky for us, I found a page on the internet by people who have already worked it out, and come up with some conditions that must be fulfilled in order to see a reduction in carbon dioxide production.

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/press.release/item/working-from-home-and-online-shopping-can-increase-carbon-emissions

It would have been nice if they'd also had a link to the actual paper.
http://www.theiet.org/factfiles/transport/unintended-page.cfm

Re:The world "may" end tomorrow.

[kurokame]

If I could get science journalism articles to always link to the research paper involved, I would be able to die happy.

Additional pollution = packaging

[mysidia]

I guess they assume all those boxes and Styrofoam peanuts will wind up in the land fill instead of recycled or re-used.

Anyone up for eco-friendly packaging materials for shipments?

Re:Additional pollution = packaging

[Anonymous Coward]

"Styrofoam" peanuts are actually usually made from cornstarch and will disintegrate on contact with water in a landfill.

Re:Additional pollution = packaging

[Yvan256]

You mean like Geämi (used by Digi-Key.ca), ExpandOS and the Easypack Shredder?

Packing "peanuts", even if made from starch, are not as eco-friendly as one would think. They take up a lot of room when shipping to your business (it's almost like you're getting a delivery of air) and they also take a lot of room to store.

Re:Additional pollution = packaging

[ScottCooperDotNet]

Both my last shipments from Amazon and NewEgg were all cardboard and brown paper, save items they get in plastic bubbles from the manufacturer. So it is mostly recyclable. Now if apartment complexes had to recycle like the local homeowners do, that would help.

Size & Weight of "items"

[Beerdood]

This is a pretty meaningless study without factoring in the size or weight of the "items" being purchased. I'm pretty sure that purchasing a new fridge at the local mall leaves a much smaller environmental impact than ordering one from 1000 km away, whereas a small object like a book leaves less of an impact as the mail delivery doesn't require additional work by the postal service (as opposed to burning gas driving to the store to buy a book)

Re:Size & Weight of "items"

[Anonymous Coward]

The fridge is probably made in China and assembled in Mexico (for US distribution), and then maybe sent to a distribution center.

Even if you bought it at the mall, most people need a delivery service to get it to their house anyway, so they might as well just ship it straight from the distribution center to your house and skip the mall. The mall is pretty much just a showroom.

A fridge probably isn't a great example. Suppose a microwave or something. The nice thing about going to a store is that I can walk out with a microwave; I don't have to pay for priority shipping and *still* have to wait days to get it.

Re:Size & Weight of "items"

[westlake]

I'm pretty sure that purchasing a new fridge at the local mall leaves a much smaller environmental impact than ordering one from 1000 km away

Where do you think the store gets the fridge?

How do you propose to get the thing home and installed?

It weighs 400 pounds.

The fridge isn't - or shouln't - be an impulse buy.

But the local appliance srore will have to maintain some stock in inventory.
It will need at least one unit unpacked for display and plugged in as a demo.

It may even need to build and maintain full-scale model kitchens.

The fridge purchased online doesn't have to be assembled or shipped until it's paid for.

That last sentence...

[unitron]

The last sentence says "But one technology site notes the study was conducted in Britain, which could have an impact on its conclusions.", which makes it sound as though conducting studies in Britain, rather than elsewhere, is much more likely to skew results somehow, but the actual article on said technology site merely points out that the results obtained are the results you get with the conditions one finds in Britain, and that conducting the study in other countries with differing transportation systems, population densities, topographical and climatological features, et cetera, might produce differing results.

As for shopping locally or online, I go where I can find what I want (or, more likely, what I'm willing to settle for) at a price I can stomach and obtain this most quickly and conveniently. Sometimes that's local, sometimes not. Usually it's neither and I have to make do without.

Re:That last sentence...

[jedidiah]

> The last sentence says "But one technology site notes the study was conducted
> in Britain, which could have an impact on its conclusions.", which makes it
> sound as though conducting studies in Britain, rather than elsewhere, is much
> more likely to skew results somehow

Yes. It's the Tories!

Re:That last sentence...

[Eskarel]

Britain has very different population and transport patterns than the US.

As a specific example, the delineation between the city and the country is rather more extreme than is the case in most US cities, and due to property prices, commuting distances of two or more hours each way are not by any means unusual or unheard of. Combined with a substantially better public transport network than is present in the US, and you can see how things would be very different.

If you're driving or taking the train into the city every day, and you pick up something while you're there, then it's likely to be substantially more efficient than ordering the item online, as the detour you made from your regular schedule is a) more than likely to be on foot, and b) a tiny percentage of the distance the shipment would have to travel to get to your home.

In the US, and in a number of other countries, while a lot of people still work in inner city areas, most people shop in outer suburban areas and tend to make special trips for the specific purpose of picking up said items. If I drive 15 minutes each way to buy something, it's quite possible that an efficient shipping company could probably generate less pollution than I would doing that single item purchase.

Re:That last sentence...

[rHBa]

To summarise (please correct me if I misunderstood your point), the UK works on a whole different scale to the US (and other spread out countries like Canada, Australia etc).

A much higher percentage of people live (or work) in a metropolitan/suburban area where a supermarket is no more that a 10 minute walk away and to order online is just being lazy, it will only add to traffic/pollution/CO2.

Yes, there are still a lot of people who have to drive to get to their nearest supermarket but significantly fewer than you get in the US. This difference is enough to swing the averages in favour of not buying online.

I'm sure that there are many areas of the UK where it makes sense to buy groceries online but overall, as an average of the population, not so much...

Re:That last sentence...

[mpgalvin]

I assure you that comparing apples and oranges is considerably more difficult in Britain, due to supply logistics considerations.

Re:That last sentence...

[drinkypoo]

As a specific example, the delineation between the city and the country is rather more extreme than is the case in most US cities, and due to property prices, commuting distances of two or more hours each way are not by any means unusual or unheard of.

Britain only has little postage stamps of country left. We have loads of it and people are quite spread out. However, due to property prices, commuting distances of two or more hours each way are not by any means unusual or unheard of, especially in California. You can't make meaningful generalizations about the US because it is so very heterogeneous. They can apply to the whole country but you rapidly get into a situation where your assumptions don't fit anything.

If I drive 15 minutes each way to buy something, it's quite possible that an efficient shipping company could probably generate less pollution than I would doing that single item purchase.

I have to drive 20 minutes to get to the nearest business. Well, I guess a gas station recently opened up closer than that, maybe 15 minutes. Wal-Mart is maybe 20 miles away but it takes almost an hour to get there because I have to go around the lake. If I want to buy anything good I have to leave the county, make it an hour. I just ordered a triple gauge set from eBay even though I just saw it in a store because I saved fifteen bucks off $40... but I didn't make a special trip to check it out.

Re:That last sentence...

[Eskarel]

Not exactly what I meant. A lot of brits commute, and they commute distances which boggle the mind of most Americans. However, the place they commute to is full of shops within walking distance, and the place they commute from may have very few shops at all. Therefor the sensible thing is to buy stuff on your way to or from work.

The same thing sort of thing in theory applies in the US, except that people don't.

Re:That last sentence...

[stewbacca]

You can get from any city to any other city in less than a day in the UK. Not so much in the US.

I was astonished that when we moved back to the US from way up north in England (North Yorkshire), the moving company that was contracted came up from London to take our stuff to the port.

Re:That last sentence...

[stewbacca]

Due to zoning, sprawl, real estate pricing, etc. here in the US, nearly EVERYONE must drive to a super market.

Outside of a few urban areas, most US cities don't have super markets in their areas that are zoned for housing. And unlike England where I could walk to the street corner co-op, we have crappy "convenience" stores which don't sell things that a coop does (like food for a full meal).

Sad/funny quote from the study

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA excerpted this quote from TFstudy:

Our report highlights two important messages for policy makers. Firstly, climate change is a real threat to our planet, so we must not get overwhelmed by the task and use rebound effects as an excuse not to act.

Secondly, policy makers must do their homework to ensure that rebound effects do not negate the positive benefits of their policy initiatives and simply move carbon emissions from one sector to another.”

Firstly, there has never been a problem of policy makers as a group using anything as an excuse not to act. Plenty of trouble with taking the wrong action, or winding up with net inaction due to political gridlock, but not declining to act -- not even temporarily until they can determine the right course of action.

Secondly, it's a shame they legislate so impetuously that you feel the need to remind them of that -- and an even bigger shame that, even with your reminder, they'll never do their homework -- but they'll be happy to pick up the rest of your study and abuse it freely to support their predetermined course of action.

Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[fyngyrz]

Last time I was in London (some years now), I was appalled at the traffic, and the disorganized nature of the city's layout. Can't say I've experienced anything like that in the US, and I've driven in a lot of US cities. Los Angeles and every Florida city I've ever been in come to mind as the most annoying, because they're so spread-out; it takes more driving to get anywhere, and that might be comparable on some level. Where I live (Montana), we're definitely in the "over 50km" class; heck, it's 140 miles to the nearest city, and that's not even in my state. If I want to shop in a city without sales tax (and oh yes, you can bet I do) then staying in-state, it's a 300 mile drive, or 482km. As you might imagine, we're definitely fans of Internet shopping!

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[EdZ]

That's mainly because parts of London were laid out prior to the horse & cart, and the vast majority pre-automobile.
Lay out a 'modern' city in grid-form, and you get... Ugh... Milton Keynes.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[gilleain]

Last time I was in London (some years now), I was appalled at the traffic, and the disorganized nature of the city's layout

Well, we tried burning it down in 1666, but that didn't quite work. Paris did a better job, but they had Napoleon.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Anonymous Coward]

London grew naturally, over hundreds of years - it wasn't designed for car traffic, which is actually a good thing for the long term.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[fyngyrz]

Yeah, I get why... I'm just saying, gee, that might affect an analysis of how efficient home delivery vs. local shopping might be.

Lay out a 'modern' city in grid-form, and you get... Ugh... Milton Keynes.

Not always. Look at Manhattan... nominally laid out in a grid, yet down in Greenwich Village, there's at least one street that actually crosses itself, I don't remember which one anymore. I think city designers might do a lot of drugs. Or simply delight in confusing people.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[theshowmecanuck]

The oldest sections of Manhattan (at the south end) are laid out hodgepodge because there was really no planning there. Horse and carts didn't guarantee logically laid out streets. More likely they were laid out by what land was least muddy in the rain or some other parameter that old cities seemed to use. e.g. some wide boulevards in some cities are wide because when it would rain and the cart track got too muddy they would travel beside it until it too got too muddy, and then they would make a new path beside it... and so on... until the first track finally returned to a state that it can be driven on. Buildings would be built far enough apart to allow this and then paved over into wide boulevards when cars came. No better reason than that. Ad hoc planning. South Manhattan was like that. Then they hired some surveyor (can't remember his name) and he laid out a grid pattern over all the remaining unurbanized (farms etc.) land; on which any expansion of the city would be built on. It just happened that the city was built at the cross over time between WTF urban planning and some sort of rational planning.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[wvmarle]

Paris also had to do with helping the police/military crack down on revolutionists. The thing is the locals were perfectly happy with the maze, they just knew their way around. The police trying to track down those revolutionaries not: they got lost, and were an easy target. That's why there was this redesign, and nowadays Paris has these huge boulevards.

Many European cities to this day are like that, a bit like a maze, mainly because they grew organically, without any central planning. Newly built neighbourhoods nowadays are also often built with bending roads, not so straight. Because it looks nicer, and it slows down cars (for safety).

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[sodul]

An other big think about street 'planning' in older european cities is that they grew with constraints: the population had to fit within the city walls for protection. As the population grew, more walls would be built further out. Usually the gates from the new walls would not align with the previous one to help break the flow of an invading army. So what seem as a wtf planning nowadays was actually tactical warfare at the time.

Grand parent is correct that the large pathways in Paris date from Napoleon. At this time, medieval tactics and city walls were obsolete so being able to send troops quickly to quell a rebelion was much more important than to plan for a siege.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[arivanov]

So is Dresden, Berlin, Koln, Helsinki, Paris, etc. That somehow does not prevent them from finding a way.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[SharpFang]

Most old cities of Europe were laid for city walls. City walls being expensive and hard to expand, the cities were laid out in circular pattern with central market and roads rexpanding radially, street circles connecting them and more radial streets added as the roads were getting further apart. If more towns were near to each other, where they met while expanding the layout was very chaotic, two unequally growing radial patterns meeting. Also, squeezing as much as possible within city walls, with chaotic land purchase/inheritance patterns often led to very chaotic city center layout... see Prague.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Anonymous Coward]

Which had the largest shopping mall in the country.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I was in London (some years now), I was appalled at the traffic, and the disorganized nature of the city's layout.

Last time I was in Barcelona (a year ago), I was appalled at the organised nature of the city's layout.

I'm a human being. I rather not live in something resembling a mathematically ordered collection of giant lego blocks -- I'll leave that one to the cyborgs and the droids.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[rainmouse]

If I want to shop in a city without sales tax (and oh yes, you can bet I do) then staying in-state, it's a 300 mile drive, or 482km. As you might imagine, we're definitely fans of Internet shopping!

This is definately reflected by looking at the sizes of the UK vs USA. For example Texas is 268601 square miles, Great Britain is only 80823 square miles. So you could fit Great Britain 3.3 times inside Texas. The population of Texas is 24.7 million, of GBR it is 58 million. That by my rough calculations (unless I've made a numerical mistake), this makes the population density of the UK almost 8 times that of Texas.

On a side note I'm curious how the US postal service survives. The UK postal service is on the brink of financial collapse and is for privatisation. If at a rough estimation, the US postal service has to travel up to 8 times the distance per person (in some areas), how the hell do they manage to stay afloat? Clearly the UK postal service needs to hire some of the guys the Americans have running their postal service and get rid of the imbeciles that run the British Royal Mail.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

Fun surveying trivia: Portland Oregon has a quirk where the streets south of Burnside on the downtown side west of the Willamette River are laid in a grid at an angle to the rest of the city. Reason is, natch, these early streets were laid out using compasses aligned to magnetic north, rest of city is aligned to true north. Wonder if that happened elsewhere. Streets north of Burnside have names familiar to Simpsons viewers - Flanders, Quimby, Lovejoy. Used to watch that show expecting to see new characters with names like Truman or Couch, this last pronounced "Cooch."

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[zrbyte]

Exactly. Disorganized cities in Europe (mainly the old city) are so disorganized because they have grown very steadily over time and that is a guarantee for chaos. Large city sections which have been built at once have had a good deal of city planning. Examples are the inner city of Budapest, my hometown, mostly built in the 19th century (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest) and Barcelona, with its grid-like arrangement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona). US cities have grown fairly rapidly, with the economic boom of the 20th century, so a good deal of city planning has gone into it.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Anonymous Coward]

While you're still stuck in the traffic in your quaint "unplanned organic growth" town with its one or two main routes constantly congested, I'll be smug in the fact that the longest queue seen around here is around 1-2 minutes.

Major accident needs a dual carriageway completely shutdown?
No problem, I just drive one more road over and still get where I need to go within 5 minutes.

The "planned" look you find so abhorrent?
The city is roughly 50 sq miles. I can get from any one place to any other place within the entire city in a maximum of 10 minutes, even if on opposing boundaries.
Add the various wooded conservation areas and the lack of overdevelopment seen in most cities, and you wouldn't even know you're in a city.
Yes, please keep your... ugh....towns and cities with no greenery, traffic jams, grimy areas in dire need of redevelopment and antiquated snobbery.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[mcvos]

Amsterdam's layout is the result of two things: trade and the swamp. We didn't need city walls because armies couldn't cross the swamp anyway. But we needed lots of canals to ferry goods between warehouses and the sea port, and then more canals and even more, moving the port around a couple of times, and all of this around the curvy Amstel river and in the middle of a swamp where some parts need more drainage than others. Later parts of the city follow the lines of roads that went through the swamp.

There's just no way you're ever going to get anything gridlike out of a situation like that. We only have grid structures in the very newest parts of the city, and more gridlike they are, the more boring they are. Irregularity is fun.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Ihmhi]

On a side note I'm curious how the US postal service survives.

Government subsidies and a monopoly on first-class mail are a couple of the reasons.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Anonymous Coward]

Paris also had to do with helping the police/military crack down on revolutionists. The thing is the locals were perfectly happy with the maze, they just knew their way around. The police trying to track down those revolutionaries not: they got lost, and were an easy target. That's why there was this redesign, and nowadays Paris has these huge boulevards.

Many European cities to this day are like that, a bit like a maze, mainly because they grew organically, without any central planning. Newly built neighbourhoods nowadays are also often built with bending roads, not so straight. Because it looks nicer, and it slows down cars (for safety).

It was so the German army could have nice places to march.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Anonymous Coward]

New York is really remarkable in that way. There was no way they could have really known it was going to get so huge, they were just very forward thinking.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[JasterBobaMereel]

Dresden, Paris, Berlin, Koln Were all extensively bombed and then rebuilt with an overall plan ...

Helsinki only dates from 1827 (as a City) and so was planned from the start ...

London was bombed, then rebuilt with almost exactly the same street plan ...

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Will.Woodhull]

I'd like to know more about the assumptions made in this survey, since it would seem to me that places with congested traffic would benefit more from online shopping than otherwise.

I'm guessing that the researchers are not bothering to factor in that a single trip by a delivery truck will fulfill multiple orders in a neighborhood. And shopping at online stores that use Fedex or UPS who make regular visits to every neighborhood anyway is not going to bump the carbon footprint at all.

The story is bogus. The question is why have the authors put their name on such drivel? Cui bono? Do the authors have a vested interest in the parking lot repaving industry? Has April Fools Day come early?

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Seb C.]

  On a side note I'm curious how the US postal service survives. The UK postal service is on the brink of financial collapse and is for privatisation. If at a rough estimation, the US postal service has to travel up to 8 times the distance per person (in some areas), how the hell do they manage to stay afloat? Clearly the UK postal service needs to hire some of the guys the Americans have running their postal service and get rid of the imbeciles that run the British Royal Mail.

Well i guess the US postal service does not have to cover any cow field here and there and concentrate on where people actually lives. The distances are stretched, yes, but the 8 multiplicator is misleading.
For instance, austin and houston metro only are about the third of the state population (around 7,5 Millions according to wikipedia).

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[h00manist]

That's mainly because parts of London were laid out prior to the horse & cart, and the vast majority pre-automobile. Lay out a 'modern' city in grid-form, and you get... Ugh... Milton Keynes.

A subway.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Raenex]

On a side note I'm curious how the US postal service survives.

They're in severe financial difficulty and borrowing from the government right now.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[h00manist]

Not always. Look at Manhattan... nominally laid out in a grid, yet down in Greenwich Village, there's at least one street that actually crosses itself, I don't remember which one anymore. I think city designers might do a lot of drugs. Or simply delight in confusing people.

Heard somewhere that Greenwich Village was land belonging to a farmer who refused to draw his streets according to the city plan, and got his way. Most people also say nowadays that it's because it's a nightmare for cars that the neighborhood has a little less traffic and fast-moving car noise, has more pedestrians, street-level shops, sidewalk tables, which bring more pedestrians, reinforcing the circle.

It's possible to have neighborhoods instead of shopping malls.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Grishnakh]

Wrong. The USPS gets no subsidies; it survives entirely on its own.

The correct answer is your second point: monopoly on first-class mail.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Grishnakh]

The USPS is pretty impressively-run, IMO, given what they're required to do (provide mail service to every address in the USA at the low cost of 41 cents per 1st-class mail item, 6 days out of the week).

Even so, they're in trouble right now, because people aren't sending much 1st-class mail any more. They're been lobbying Congress to reduce mail service to 5 days/week, which would save them an enormous amount of money, but stupid Congress doesn't seem to want to allow it.

The USPS has several big challenges: 1) they have to deliver mail everywhere, which includes addresses in rural Montana and other such states, for the same cost as mail delivered in dense cities like NYC. And, they have to do it 6 days/week, even if that means paying carriers to deliver only a few pieces of mail, because of the constantly-decreasing amount of mail. People aren't sending letters to each other much any more, and now they're not even bothering much with bills, as that's moved online as well. So they're mainly trying to survive on: 1) junk mail, 2) what few 1st-class letters are still sent (official business mail, like notices from your insurance company which aren't sent electronically yet), and 3) small packages (like Ebay transactions). All three of these are probably going down these days: 1) who reads junk mail? 2) more and more stuff is sent electronically now. 3) Ebay seems to be waning in popularity because of its excessive fees.

I think they should reduce mail service to 4 days/week (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday) for all but Express service, and keep postage costs low. But stupid Congress probably wouldn't allow that.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[orgelspieler]

Midland, Texas has three grids. The downtown area is based on true north. There's a little patch aligned with the railroads, and the rest is roughly aligned with I-20. The neighborhoods within the major grids are all squiggly.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[ScrewMaster]

The USPS gets no subsidies; it survives entirely on its own.

Which, when you think about it, is remarkable for a government (especially a United States Federal Government) bureaucracy of such size and complexity.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Grishnakh]

That's very true. They should find the guys running the USPS and put them in charge of the entire Federal government; they'd certainly do a much better job than the current morons (or any of the morons who have been running it for the past decade).

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Anonymous Coward]

Irregularity is fun.

You clearly haven't had explosive diarrhea recently.

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[ScrewMaster]

That's very true. They should find the guys running the USPS and put them in charge of the entire Federal government; they'd certainly do a much better job than the current morons (or any of the morons who have been running it for the past decade).

You'll have to go further back than that, I'm afraid. Really, they've always been morons (Congress has been corrupt since its inception.) But because the pre-World War II Federal Government was tiny compared to its current state, they couldn't so much damage. Now, heh, they've become expert pickpockets, fleecing the American taxpayer and, indeed, much of the world.

Ultimately, you can lay the blame for this at Hitler's feet. Germany and its erstwhile ally Japan forced America to get involved in a big way. That, of course, meant increased taxes and bigger government. That was all supposed to go away after the war was over, but realistically, how often do politicians willingly give up more power and a massive revenue stream?

Re:Merry olde England, a factor? Certes, ye jest!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fun to see how those same-looking blocks turn out to be very different based on parameters that nobody cared about or nobody saw.

Conclusion

[DraconPern]

The british post system sucks.

Not exactly

[Chmcginn]

The amount of gasoline consumed is directly proportional to the weight being carried.

It's more like directly proportional to the total vehicle weight. A 5400 lb delivery vehicle is going to use a lot of fuel even if it's nearly empty.

Yeah, and trees cause smog, too

[Artifakt]

The nearest 'local' mall for me is 21 miles away (and we're talking strip mall, not big mall). The nearest place with some of the stores I routinely favor is 32, and there are products I have bought in the last 6 months that were not physically available within 220 miles in any brick and mortar store. I have bought over 20 items this year that were shipped from over 3,000 miles away, including a book that left its press in the hands of a Laotian native who bicycled with it to a town in Viet-Nam, where it went in the back of a physician's car for two days, ending up in Hong Kong when his cousin took over and finished that leg of the route, where it was packed into a 'containerized' shipping system, otherwise mostly full of dry cat food (, bulk, uncoated, green), and crossed the pacific to San Francisco to become a UPS delivery to me a few days later. (All this was recounted when I tracked the package via Amazon's links. Thanks Dr. Trin and family). If anyone can actually calculate the ecological consequences of that, besides my book smelling vaguely like those little chlorophilised nuggets they put in dry cat food to give kitties fresher breath, I'd really like to see the math.

      In fact, this sort of case sounds like just where the study may have gone wrong. Did they compare the cost to ship from a remote warehouse to the end consumer with the cost to drive to a local store, when, to compare apples to apples, the second half of the equation should have included the cost to ship in bulk from some central warehouse to the local store plus the cost to drive locally? Did they include the cost to sometimes drive to a store that was out of the product, or did they assume consumers always do the sensible thing and call first, and screw-ups with inventory and such don't routinely occur. (It's dirty statistics to assume from the start one group always acts rationally or in an idealised manner, when your overall conclusion is the other group is probably making a mistake). That's not really clarified in the article, and the whole article also sounds like the people writing it thought there were very few cases where it would make more sense to order online, yet, their parameters seem to fit about 80 million Americans for the majority of their purchases, and most of them for a decent fraction. I know Great Britain is smaller, but it's not that tiny such that 'everything' is somehow within 50 Km., plus they use smaller trucks for more of their shipping to small towns, which should add a bit to the percentages, so I doubt it applies there as well as they claim.

Re:Yeah, and trees cause smog, too

[gmhowell]

Interesting story, but you need a correction: the chemicals in cat litter are not to give your cat better breath, it is to give your dog better breath.

Re:Yeah, and trees cause smog, too

[rio]

As someone who lives 40 miles from the nearest walmart, I mail order just about everything I can. The cost in time and fuel doesn't even compare, I'd go broke only shopping "local"[actually "regional"] (and have little for choices) and rack up many fewer billable working hours. I run a mail-order business too (which happens to take orders by internet, phone, fax, snailmail, pigeon or dogsled).

I live on an old freight rail line. From here we still send you wheat, corn and soybeans. In the early years, it was the rails that brought most of the goods, and it was made available for pick up (or distribution) at the (very) local level. Initially, of course, you had to walk, ride your horse or drive your wagon to town (which could take a day). But it surely beat months of travel going several hundred miles overland to the nearest "real city" I'm sure. Don't ask me about the carbon footprint of these things: don't know, don't care.

Sears Roebuck was the "biggie" (probably akin to WalMart now) and their catalog + rails made availability of almost anything/everything to the hinterlands for a price. There really are "kit houses" out here that were ordered from Sears back in the day.

The internet + shipping serves in the same capacity now.

Yes, I will go "hunt down" my to-be-purchased prey in person when I can, it's way more fun and satisfying to triumphantly tote the "pelt" out of the store. But, the hunting is really boring in the more remote areas like this, most of the time. And many things (like most of the supplies I require to manufacture) aren't even available locally. Several of my suppliers that make proprietary items for me, also live in remote areas, and using the transport/ freight systems... we're able to do enough business that I only have to leave my immediate environs once a week. Once every 2-3 weeks if I choose to plan out farther. They don't need to leave home much either.

Groceries-- those I have to personally purchase. Nobody ships produce door-to-door here that I'm aware of. But if there was a firm that did for a reasonable price, I'd be using that too. (Or if the grocery 12 miles away offered delivery, I'd take them up on the offer).

I can't see how this is LESS "green".

What costs more, 25 people a day from here driving the 40 miles to town for a doc appt or a doc driving out once a week to take care of the basics of those same people in a small outreach office?

Society has gone through periods of more or less efficiency overall. In tougher times, you figure out the shipping costs WAY LESS than the fuel to get to town (in my case, I have to order from 3 different outfits with avg shipping to account for the fuel to get to town and back just once).

The cost can't be more than that for the shippers, else the shipment would cost me more than going myself. Very LARGE or weighty items, I am better off to drive a considerable distance (packing peanuts-- don't weigh much, cost a fortune for mere volume to have shipped). In this case, I can drive 200 miles, make an overnight trip if I choose, eat at a good restaurant/visit friends and end up breaking even or coming out ahead of having the same volume shipped. You just pick which deal works best in time vs. money on that score.

What the internet and shipping items by mail (especially smaller items) does is provide huge universal access to all manner of things you want (and didn't know you wanted) at what is probably the least possible cost overall. Especially if you live in a remote area. If you live in a place where you can walk around the block and examine the goods in a number of stores, having the same items shipped you could get locally wouldn't work out as neatly, no doubt.

I do buy locally whatever it is they have that I need/want. It would make things really lousy if we had NO businesses at all out here. I can get basic groceries, basic hardware and autoparts. (40 miles for a ream of paper though).

BullShit!!!

[b4upoo]

In my town over 100 businesses have closed their doors and endless others have not even tried to start up due to competition from online sources. Just how much energy and pollution does that stop. Think of all that construction and all those employees and customers driving to those stores every day. And think of the sprawl issue and the road building that has to take place for brick and mortar stores.
                      In other words simple direct comparisons are faulty as hell. Yes, UPS does burn a bit of diesel delivering a product purchased online. But then again one or two suppliers might supply an entire nation or cluster of nations with a specific product eliminating the existence of tens of thousands of buildings.

Re: BullShit!!!

[couchslug]

"In my town over 100 businesses have closed their doors and endless others have not even tried to start up due to competition from online sources."

Citation very, very much needed. :)

Re: BullShit!!!

[krazytekn0]

and who needs jobs?

Forgotton factor

[dln385]

Every weekday at exactly 11:00 AM, the UPS truck drives past my house. Whenever I purchase goods online, the UPS truck drops it off at 11:00 AM. What's the carbon footprint of my order? I would have to guess virtually zero.

Re:Forgotton factor

[kongit]

And even then a lot of smaller packages get delivered by the USPS. They go by your house every day but Sunday anyway.

Re:Forgotton factor

[siwelwerd]

Unless you and everyone else on the route start buying twice as much stuff online, necessitating two trucks. Which one package gets the footprint for the extra truck?

Cant get stuff locally

[Anonymous Coward]

If I could buy things locally, I wouldn't need to get them online!

Unless small shops start carrying every possible product, online shopping is going to win.

Re:Cant get stuff locally

[h4rr4r]

You should have logged in to post that.
I can rarely find what I need in stores. That and stores won't let me shop at 11pm when I have some free time, which amazon seems fine with.

How many orders ship on one UPS truck?

[crovira]

Its not the end purchaser who realizes some environmental benefits, its the shipper.

Its not about Joe Schmoe's environmental impact, its about Amazon and UPS and Fed Ex and USPS combined carbon footprint versus the environmental impact of all the Joe Schmoes out there.

This was bogus science starting from a false premise.

Re:How many orders ship on one UPS truck?

[SharpFang]

Except it's bout Amazon and UPS and Fed Ex and USPS combined vs Joe Schmoe and Wal-Mart and Best Buy and their suppliers combined. As someone said before, wares don't teleport themselves to the malls, and a mall takes more energy to operate than a mailbox.

Re:How many orders ship on one UPS truck?

[azalin]

and a mall takes more energy to operate than a mailbox.

And then a strange thought hit me:

What would a mailbox look like, that actually did use more energy than a mall? What could it do? Wouldn't that be an interesting "Ask Slashdot" project? (Probably not, but that didn't stop the other posts either)

Simply adding a bar code scanner, a computer, an x-ray machine, a gas chromatograph, a catapult, an incinerator, a liquid nitrogen cooler, a missile defence system and the like would not even sum up to a fraction of it. Not even if I included a robot butler to bring the mail to me and sharks with lasers to... err...mmh... be sharks with lasers.
If I could include a VLHC that might be different, but haven't found a good excuse (to be honest, not even a lousy one) for including the collider in the design yet.

Re:How many orders ship on one UPS truck?

[stewbacca]

Exactly. Either way, the book I buy from Amazon gets shipped to my house from a warehouse and a UPS distro center, or it gets shipped to a store then I drive to the store to pick it up. Environmental impact is the same.

Re:How many orders ship on one UPS truck?

[Grishnakh]

Not necessarily. Your mailbox doesn't require A/C and people to staff it all day long. Stores do. Stores use a lot of energy just to operate; warehouses use much less: less energy (they don't need lots of A/C to keep customers comfortable), and much less staff, and much less floor space too (per product).

Plus, you buying one book from your local store means a lot of fuel is consumed, because it's unlikely you're buying lots of other goods in that same trip. The UPS/Fedex truck, however, is delivering lots of goods per trip, and driving on a computer-optimized route.

Re:How many orders ship on one UPS truck?

[stevesy17]

Not necessarily. Your mailbox doesn't require A/C and people to staff it all day long.p>

You would be surprised... I buy a lot of stuff online!

Lucky for me....

[Anonymous Coward]

...all of my online purchases involve goods shipped in from overseas from countries OTHER than the U.K.. Plus, I tend to buy in bulk when I can manage it.

Hypothetical

[93 Escort Wagon]

What if I'm buying CO2 credits online?

Re:Hypothetical

[blair1q]

The mass of the delivery truck divided by the mass of a single CO2 credit is on the order of infinity plus a metric assload.

Which is highly inefficient in environmental terms.

You're far better off growing a rainforest in the back of your Hummer, sequestering CO2 and delivering O2 to the environment while you drive.

fdafafafad

[Anonymous Coward]

NEWS FLASH no one gives a fuck! I shop online because it's convenient and sometimes cheaper; that is all.

Where's the paper?

[Animats]

I'd like to see the actual paper, which doesn't seem to be linked. Do they mean 25 purchases to one location, or 25 purchases per delivery run?

Buses, by the way, have a similar problem. Buses have good energy efficiency when full and when going roughly from source to destination. They have terrible efficiency when they're running winding routes designed to cover as much area as possible, carrying few people. Which is the typical suburban bus situation.

Re:Where's the paper?

[adaviel]

I'd like to see the actual paper, which doesn't seem to be linked. Do they mean 25 purchases to one location, or 25 purchases per delivery run?

Buses, by the way, have a similar problem. Buses have good energy efficiency when full and when going roughly from source to destination. They have terrible efficiency when they're running winding routes designed to cover as much area as possible, carrying few people. Which is the typical suburban bus situation.

The figure for 25 purchases refers to "25 orders delivered at the same time" This is from Plepy's paper "the grey side of ict" http://www.graduateinstitute.ch/aspd/wsis/DOC/200EN.PDF, which quotes a 1999 paper by G. Jönson, F. Orremo, C. Wallin and K. Ringsberg. Which I could not find .. time to go home and eat ..:-7

DHL but who's counting... :-)

[crovira]

Even if you factor in all the companies who handle small parcel shipping (say under 100 lbs/box) it is still a lot more efficient and has a much smaller carbon footprint that the hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands and millions of parcels that are delivered everyday.

It gets even more efficient if we take how many railroad car-full of products get shipped to regional centers. (What? You think TigerDirect doesn't send their supplier's stuff to UPS warehouses and lets customers' orders ship from the closest one? It beats shipping from only one place.)

FedEx, UPS, DHL and the USPS all have deals like this.

YOU as an end consumer aren't affected directly.

The manufacturers and resellers love NOT having to pay for warehousing.

Why do you think "Bob's Furniture" "Bob-o-pedic" can get to your house with next day or two day delivery?

Sealy gets an order for 10,000 Posturepedic mattresses, re-brands them, delivers them "en masse" to a single warehouse and stays the Hell out of the retail chain.

"Bob's Furniture" gets orders from all over, gets the mattresses from the warehouse onto a truck and does local deliveries and stay's the Hell out of the production chain.

As long as YOU get a bed for cheap and fast, what the hell do you care?

Its just one mattress,

"Bob's Furniture" handles thousands of these delivery every day. Its the most efficient way of handling retail sales.

Sealy handles thousands of "Bob's" type clients everyday and sells beds in lots, lots and lots of lots. Millions of mattresses a month. Its the most efficient way of handling wholesales sales.

might be time to make suggestive headlines illegal

[MichaelDa.Kristopeit]

Online Shopping May Actually Never Perhaps Always Increase Pollution Sometimes.

no sales tax + free shipping = i have more money left to offset my own carbon footprint in the ways i choose to.

Soooo...bogus.

[Anonymous Coward]

So - I get into my 35mpg car and drive 4 miles to the nearest book-store. I buy one paperback and drive 4 miles back home again. Please explain to me how that could POSSIBLY be less polluting than downloading a book onto my Kindle?

Since it is (I hope) patently obvious that downloading a book is more energy efficient than buying one in a bricks-and-mortar store - it is abundantly clear that this study is not true in general. It must presume some purchasing pattern that is vastly more wasteful than the example I give.

I could imagine that if I cause a UPS truck to drive 4 miles out of it's normal route to get to my house to deliver a paperback book from Amazon - then since it's MPG is worse than my car, then that would be an energy-inefficient way to buy a book...doubly so because the book arrives wrapped in plastic airbags within a bulky cardboard box. But in the other hand, centralizing book warehousing must be more efficient than having hundreds of stores with dozens of staff, etc, etc.

This must all depend critically on a whole bunch of factors. To pick an extreme possibility: If everyone in my street bought a paperback from Amazon on the same day - then the UPS delivery overhead is amortized (although the over-packaging isn't)...and the balance swings towards the benefits of bulk delivery.

It's unlikely that buying (let's say) potatoes online would be more efficient than walking 100 yards to a neighborhood store - but that's not the way online purchasing works.

My point is that even if correct (which I kinda doubt), this finding is exceedingly sensitive to the number of people shopping this way - and the nature of the goods they buy. It may be that we're in the early stages of a revolution that will result in a large improvement in energy efficiency...but you can't do that overnight - and it's perfectly possible that things have to get a little bit worse before they get a whole lot better.

We have to be extremely careful with studies like this.

I wish there were more information about how they arrived at this rather startling conclusion in the popular accounts of it.

Re:Soooo...bogus.

[daveime]

I wish there were more information about how they arrived at this rather startling conclusion in the popular accounts of it.

How many times ?

You do NOT question the scientists, they have been peer reviewed, you are just a skeptic denier terrorist hippy !

They misframed the point

[macraig]

The point of online shopping - at least for me - is that I'm more likely to get exactly what I (think I) want. Since "online" is also where I happen to do 99% of my product research, it's a natural segue. "Green" was never a factor when choosing to buy online. I save my greenness for local shopping when I either take my bike with trailer/baskets attached or drive and take my own cart and skip the bags entirely, etc.

I'm doing my part...

[hAckz0r]

I only buy recycled junk off of eBay, and from now on, only items designated as multiple 'lots' greater than 25 items. The more junk you buy the less goes into some remote far away landfill. Who would have thought that importing somebodies sinking/water polluting fleet of Junk from China could save the US environment?

Re:I'm doing my part...

[daveime]

Fair's fair, China has been buying an awful lot of US junk recently. Shares in Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citigroup, to name just a few.

Re:I'm doing my part...

[hAckz0r]

They (China and several other Asian countries) also buy all our electronic garbage and recycle the gold and other expensive metals. Unfortunately the lead, cadmium, and other toxic metals are left behind to pollute their own environment.

Its strange how short term economic gains influences such bad decisions. Its almost as bad as if we were exporting politics. </humor>

Unwanted or defective goods

[istartedi]

Did they account for the fact that traditional retailers must ship some unwanted goods?

To counter that, online buyers must return-ship defective goods a greater distance. Or do they? Don't traditional retailers then turn around and ship defective goods back to the manufacturer anyway?

Is the incidence of unwanted goods significantly greater than the incidence of defective goods? I would think "yes", but that's pure speculation.

Crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't make any sense. We have pollution everyday.
unless u don eat, don go out from ur huz.

sounds like a stimulus project

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the kind of shit we financed with the stimulus. Interesting question, but without even a whiff of practicality.

In other news, it was deemed beneficial to the environment for people to take one monster shit a week instead of the more average daily bowel movement. Researchers admitted that while one shit a week would require drastic dietary changes, a more realistic goal of twice a week could still make major headway in staving off Global Climate Disruption (GCD). If only 10% of the population managed the small sacrifice of the twice-a-week plan, in twenty years, in a desert outside Texas, the ambient surface temperature would only increase by 1.5 degrees celsius instead of the expected 1.8.

Who else has student loans to show for this?

Hook me up with PV!

[eggman9713]

Brick and mortar stores can serve a great purpose that a bunch of UPS trucks can't. All that flat roof area is great for putting up solar panels! You get to use the land for the store AND generate power, not just generate power (if the panels were mounted on the ground with no store built).

Re:Hook me up with PV!

[shermo]

And solar energy is free! Win win.

Re:Hook me up with PV!

[mjwx]

Brick and mortar stores can serve a great purpose that a bunch of UPS trucks can't. All that flat roof area is great for putting up solar panels

This is London, there is no sun.

Re:Hook me up with PV!

[zrq]

Amazon don't store their inventory in the trucks. The trucks just collect the items that have been sold and deliver them to the consumer.

Amazon use large warehouses to store the inventory, large warehouses to store the data centers that coordinate the inventory, deliveries and purchases, and UPS use large warehouses to park the trucks when they aren't out delivering. All those warehouses will have nice big flat roofs - as opposed to the various sized odd shaped small roofs of all those individual brick and mortar stores.

I agree it would be good if the brick and mortar stores put up solar panels. But I don't agree that brick and mortar stores would somehow be better at providing solar power than online stores would. It would be better if the individual brick and mortar stores AND the large warehouses used by the online stores all used their roof space to generate some form of solar power.

Newcastle

[Eowaennor]

What, no cracks about conducting research whilst drinking a certain brown ale?

But...

[Tharsman]

The mailman who delivers my packages drives by every day regardless of me buying something or not... How does him walking to my apt door (that is by the building mailbox) makes his vehicle cause any more pollution?

I'm also very sure the plane that came my way with my package in it was going to go that way with or without my package.

Multiple deliveries per stop

[FranTaylor]

In lower Manhattan, many UPS package cars (their name for the brown delivery vehicles) make ONE stop. Yes, they drop off and then pick up an entire package car's worth of packages as it sits in one spot.

In my neighborhood the UPS truck services at least 10 houses from one stop. He has packages to deliver to at least one of us every day.

Many UPS package cars are driven only a few miles each day.

UPS is VERY VERY good at managing and minimizing their fuel costs, it is very much in their interest to do so.

Onine Shopping Press Article

[Rexwald]

This is an article designed to get a couple of backlinks from an authority site.....

Shipping costs reflect this

[gurps_npc]

Most of the time I don't buy online because the shipping cost exceeds any value saved. The exceptions are when I buy enough to satisfy the free shipping requirements or if I could not find the merchandise in my home town. I would expect that the typical online purchaser lives in an area without extensive shopping. Otherwise it just makes more sens to go to the store and physically examine the item. Check it's size, look for defects, etc.

Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to start ordering packs of gum shipped to me in individual containers. Muhahahaha, take that environment and weepy Mommy-Gaia types!

no, shipping pollution

[alizard]

also works in favor of online shopping. What's the carbon loading of people driving individually to a store vs a single UPS truck full of packages delivering to hundreds of households? This isn't the only study on this subject that has been done, and IIRC, the other studies came up with the opposite conclusion.

However, this is the study you can expect to see cited in the mass media.

disproving the counterintuitive

[tverbeek]

Did anyone actually think that having items (over)packaged individually, rush-shipped by plane, then delivered one at a time by a gasoline-powered truck, would have environmental benefits over shipping them in bulk to regional distribution centers where people would pick them up along with numerous other items at their convenience (i.e. bricks-n-mortar stores)? Unless you think that the book you order from 2000 miles away with two-day delivery is going to be brought to your door by the book fairy or a matter transporter, it's obviously not going to cut down on pollution!

Re:disproving the counterintuitive

[Firethorn]

Well, next-day air would rather tend to be the worst situation, though I figure most of the trucks are diesel, not gasoline.

Best case would probably be USPS or it's equivalent. Ground transport with lots of other objects.

Still, most of my online purchases are for items I can't get locally, so I don't think it matters that much.

Re:disproving the counterintuitive

[xaxa]

Unless you think that the book you order from 2000 miles away ...

The study is from the UK. 2000 miles away would be somewhere like Jerusalem, 200 miles is more likely, and probably a lot less if you live near one of the biggest cities.

I can see it's more efficient for people to use public transport to get to/from a shop, but I'm surprised at how far you need to be driving to make online win (50km).

Re:disproving the counterintuitive

[TheRaven64]

Did anyone actually think that having items (over)packaged individually, rush-shipped by plane, then delivered one at a time by a gasoline-powered truck

Where on earth do you shop that this is the case? Stuff I buy online typically comes with minimal extra packing and is put in the post. The 'truck' that delivers it is the post van that delivers the rest of my mail and comes to my door every day. Although my most frequent online deliveries are from Tesco, in which case they come in a refrigerated truck from the large branch a few miles away and deliver 40+ people's shopping on the same trip, adding significantly less than the distance from my house to the supermarket to its total journey distance for each customer.

Re:disproving the counterintuitive

[Ritchie70]

Actually, a lot of the stuff I get from Amazon that is actually sold by Amazon comes from 200 miles away so far as I can tell.

I've gotten things from other online vendors that shipped from an area I might consider shopping in, it's so close.

The UPS and USPS truck is going to be at the shipper's facility every day. They're going to be in my neighborhood every day.

I don't do it for environmental reasons - that's silly - but it's hard to believe it's much more than a wash either way.

this isn't the only study that's been done

[alizard]

in this area, just the only one I know of that's come to this . . . interesting conclusion.

While I agree with you that the press release the original post linked to has no substantial content, frankly, I don't care whether the study was rigged through cherry-picking data or simple incompetence on the part of the researchers. Though I'll be automatically discounting any research from this academic institution in future (their credibility from my POV just dropped to Oral Roberts University level) and I recommend everyone else do the same.

All I'm curious about is who paid for this study.

If it's easy to do stuff more stuff is done

[dbIII]

Looking at the wiki article it appears to be about considering input without much regard to output so I can see why it's long forgotten.
I can see how some could apply it in the context of greenhouse gas producing fuels but consider that fairly irrelevant since all of our energy sources have some sort of cost that way (even nukes get power from a rock that requires a lot of processing).
IMHO it's better to look at outputs vs input instead of inputs alone, and that includes negative outputs (Adam Smith's "bads") as well as positive outputs (Adam Smith's "goods").

Garbage headline

[HawaiianToast]

Online shopping has no effect on pollution.

so you're assuming that

[alizard]

we go from our homes to bookstores via matter transporter? I don't know what kind of fantasy world you live in, but in the world I live in (suburb underserved by public transit), every trip to a bookstore means driving a car. And if one is buying online, it's more an exception than the rule to use the overnight delivery you're comparing it to.

As opposed to a UPS delivery truck serving 100 plus households per day on computer-optimized routings.

Compare 100 trips to a store by individual vehicles vs one UPS truck's daily deliveries, if your ability to do simple arithmetic is up to it.

Re:so you're assuming that

[16K Ram Pack]

The report looks like someone lobbying for more "green" funds by writing an anti-progress report.

They don't seem to like people working from home because it increases urban sprawl, and then assume that leads to more pollution. But if we're working from home, we aren't doing any travelling there, and if we're internet shopping, we reduce most of our travel there too. So, it removes our biggest travelling needs.

I've been working from home for a while, and I rarely drive now. I mix up local shops which I can walk to with internet shopping.

Re:so you're assuming that

[moonbender]

Well, the study can't make a statement that's true for every living situation. Since you live in basically the most inefficient circumstances possible (high wealth consumerist suburban), perhaps in your case shipping is more efficient, though it's still incredibly inefficient compared to other living situations. Even then, one would think you could stop at the bookstore on your way to wherever, or combine trips in some other way.

Re:so you're assuming that

[moonbender]

No, it's one of many, many reports that show urban sprawl leads to increased pollution, instead of assuming it. That doesn't mean it has to be true in all cases, maybe your situation is different, maybe not.

Re:so you're assuming that

[Sarius64]

Because I'm sure that the $250k of software I just downloaded for work would have been much more efficient in a USPS box delivery. Sheesh.

Re:so you're assuming that

[16K Ram Pack]

Urban sprawl led to more pollution. What I'm saying is that more internet use might actually reverse that. If you can get things to your home, or work from home, then the fact that your far from home doesn't matter.

Re:so you're assuming that

[moonbender]

Mobility, construction, infrastructure, heating are all more environmentally expensive with urban sprawl; not to mention the obvious increase in land use. In that situation, telecommuting might be a net gain (I don't know), but it won't make up for any of those factors. So it might be a good thing, but I doubt it'll reverse anything.

In Soviet Russia

[krazytekn0]

Pollution Online Shops for YOU!

3.5 shopping trips? 25 items?

[SteeldrivingJon]

This seems like an odd model.

The "25 items" thing sounds like they're assuming a trip to the grocery store, where people tend to buy a lot of items at once.

The things I buy online aren't like that. If I were buying them in the real world, chances are I'd be driving out to find a couple of specific items, then driving home, possibly visiting multiple stores in the process, trying to find what I want.

I suspect if you compared online orders to the emissions load of a single person, driving alone, to multiple stores, to find one item, then online orders look a lot better.

Re:3.5 shopping trips? 25 items?

[Anonymous Coward]

The math does seem odd. When I buy something over the net (newegg, amazon, llbean, etc), I have a vision of some big warehouse where my purchase is grabbed off the shelf, taken to packaging and then turned over to ups who sends my package (along with multiple others from the same warehouse) to a distribution center, which then puts my package and thousands others on a truck to my local distribution center, then to a smaller local truck for delivery as part of an overall route. Even though this uses big trucks to deliver my purchase, a pro-rated portion of the delivery seems to be on the same order as my driving to a store. (based on a shipping cost of $5 to $10 charged by these retailors when charged). As opposed to the just-in-time stocking practiced by the big retailors who replenish their local stores by replinishing stock from a central remote warehouse. Does not seem like the delivery costs would be that different except for that final mile (metaphorically) to my house.

The 25 to one ration seems extremly high.

Re:3.5 shopping trips? 25 items?

[Tim C]

I don't know about the US, but here in the UK online grocery ordering is pretty popular. All (almost all?) the supermarkets offer it, at least in and around the big cities (I live on the outskirts of London so can't comment on more rural areas). You place your order, it's fulfilled by your local participating store, loaded into a small refrigerated van and delivered to your house during the time slot you specify.

It's been a good 4 or 5 years since I regularly, physically went to the supermarket to do a "full" grocery shop; shopping online is so much faster and more convenient (especially as I don't drive) that to me it's well worth the delivery charge.

That's one way in which conducting the research in a different country may yield different results.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the UK, whenever I ordered a CD/DVD from Amazon or Play, they were delivered by the Royal Mail with the rest of my post. The mall I would otherwise have shopped at was in the same place as the nearest Royal Mail sorting office. Since no special trip was required by either the sender or the deliverer, surely it's far better to let Big Companies like Amazon, Play and Royal Mail employ their economies of scale/centralised distribution centres than to drive my dunger of a car to the mall. Oh, and I now "telecommute" from New Zealand.

What about fat asses as well?

[LostMyBeaver]

Let's not forget the "do all your shopping in your pajamas" effect. While I can buy most of my stuff online these days, and I can even save enough money that I can buy three different models and toss the two I like less because of it, I still get off my ass and go to the store... while I can still get off my fat ass that is.

If you need to go out and shop around to find what you're looking for, there is walking involved. There's bending over and picking things up. Sure, this doesn't sound like a lot of exercise, but 2 years ago, I went from 200lbs to 152lbs in 4 months by doing a little of this and a little of that.

I found simply being out and about made me eat less and eating is something a lot of people do when "I'm bored" sets in. The exercise from walking alone isn't just a matter of exercise, but it's a means of doing something other than eating.

Shopping in a mall probably wastes gas in the car and pumps carbon into the atmosphere. But shopping from your couch adds wrappers to the trash bin, not to mention all the other paper involved. As you're shopping from your couch for things like radios and ipods, eventually your ass gets big enough that you start shopping for pants and shirt because you're embarrassed to go into the Big and Fat shop. Of course, if you find yourself sitting next to a skinny little hottie on a bench while she's nipping on a yogurt with muesli and you're chopping down on a triple whopper with extra bacon, you should take the hint then and there.

The environmental impact is much much worse from shopping online than the article leads. People stop moving, they get fat, they buy bigger cars to haul their fat asses around and they buy bigger articles of clothing and guess what... they order more stuff online because moving their fat asses is even harder than before.

Now that I'm "in shape" I loaded up a bag 50lbs of weight (about the same as I lost, 23ish KG for the rest of the world) and I went for a 5km walk with it on. I damn near died from that. I have far more muscle mass now than I did then, but carrying that weight and walking a decent speed was bordering on impossible. If I had that weight back for real, I'd lay in bed and order everything online and say screw it. I'd have a house completely filled with blister packs and cardboard because I wouldn't even bother moving my ass to bring it to the trash can.

Should be ban shopping online because it's killing the planet? Hell no, I love shopping online and it's keeping the guy who has to move my 100lb boxes around from getting a fat ass. But we certainly should consider a way we can get fat assed people out of their couches as well.

Read this crappy study here

[shilly]

That was a crap press release about a crappy study. Study is here:
http://www.theiet.org/factfiles/transport/unintended-page.cfm

Look what you find:
- It's not new research, it's a compilation of existing research
- No mention of the methodology used to select studies. And to think that engineers get sniffy about medical research not being properly scientific -- it's impossible to imagine a Cochrane meta-analysis being done this shoddily
- The key studies date from ~2001/02! For online shopping! That's just nuts. Even if they were well-conducted, they're obviously well out-of-date and based on what was, then, much more theory than practice. No Ocado, Amazon a fraction of its current size, no online music to speak of, etc.

Crap crap crap

Blame The Malls & Chain Stores

[pandrijeczko]

People shop online for 2 reasons:

1. The stuff is cheaper

2. There's more diversity online because real stores don't stock a wide range of stuff

Twenty years ago we had thriving town centres with local specialist retailers who stocked a lot of the stuff you wanted and could probably order it for you if they didn't have it in stock.

Then the out-of-town supermarkets arrived with the sole intention of profiting by killing off those businesses. Because of the 80/20 rule (80% of sales are made from 20% of a product range), the supermarkets could stock the most profitable 20% of a range and kill all the profits of the small retailers, thus driving them out of business. (If you don't believe me, check the range of music CDs or magazines that your local supermarket actually stocks.)

With the small retailers killed off, in came the developers who put up large shopping malls with such high business rates that only the chain stores could afford to rent units in them - again, chain stores specialise in selling large volumes of small ranges. This led to the phenomenon of "clone towns" where the majority of British town centres now contain the same shops with very few specialist independent retailers.

So blame the supermarkets & chain stores for removing any pleasure from shopping. I used to be able to spend hours in my home town centre walking around new and second-hand music stores & book stores - when I was into wargaming and RPG gaming, there were even two shops for that that weren't Games Workshop - but these days it's one chain music store and two chain bookstores.

Hard to believe

[Peter Simpson]

I shop online because I'm tired of going to the store and finding that the size/color/variety I'm looking for is out of stock or not carried by that branch. Then I get to drive somewhere else to look for it. Online, click and exactly what I wanted is on its way.
I'm not convinced that it pollutes more to buy things online, but at least I get what I want without driving all over town

What if the item is not in the store?

[Anonymous Coward]

More than once, I have looked for an item in a store and not found it. Then I go to another store and don't find it. And so on. Bookstores are bad for this. After looking at 2-3 stores, I come home and order what I need online. If I had just ordered online, I would not have made so many trips and I would pollute less. A fallacy of this study is the assumption that all inventories are equal. (Maybe they are in Britain, where studies apparently need to have caveats?) I'd love to have some local store that has the books, computer parts, etc that I need. But I order from B&N and newegg because I know they don't.

Full Report

[pfafrich]

Full Report: "Rebound: unintended consequences of transport policy and technology innovations", page has link to the PDF.

Re:Full Report

[pfafrich]

Actually the report merely cites a previous paper on the subject: Plepys A (2002), "The Grey Side of ICT", Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 22: 509-523 PDF. That is the paper with the details.

Re:Full Report

[pfafrich]

Which in turn cites "Jonson G, Orremo F, Wallin C, Ringsberg K. IT, mat and miljo . En miljokonsekvensanalys av elektronisk handel med dagligvaror. Stockholm: Naturvardsverket. Institutionen fo r Designvetenskaper, Forpackningslogistik/Lunds Tekniska Hogskola; 1999. p. 102." Which is where the 3.5 traditional shopping trips figure comes from.

So we have a 2010 press release, summarising a 2010 report which quotes a 2002 paper, which in turn quotes a 1999 paper.

Not Jevon's Paradox

[Half-pint HAL]

The article isn't talking about increased efficiency encouraging consumption. It is basically arguing that for a fixed level of consumption, the internet is less efficient than shops (except where bulk purchasing is involved).

HAL.

Re:Not Jevon's Paradox

[timeOday]

Look at this part of the article in particular: "It also highlights that working from home can increase home energy use by as much as 30 per cent, and can lead to people moving further from the workplace, stretching urban sprawl and increasing pollution."

So, since you don't have to commute as much, you might not mind moving further from work, making a longer drive on days you still do commute.

Re:Not Jevon's Paradox

[Half-pint HAL]

Again, that's not Jevon's paradox, although it's related. Homeworkers' energy use mostly comes from heating and lighting dozens of people's houses rather than a single shared open-plan office. Urban sprawl is a different problem, so it's far more complex than Jevon's paradox.

On the other hand...

[beh]

Having lived in London for a few years, and having been to NY for a few weeks, I would like to offer these advantages:

a) The rectangular layout actually makes traffic worse - in London, a lot of people won't drive a car, simply because you can get lost easily. In NY, even someone with severely impaired navigation skills can find a place by car - and many of them do. (In London, if more and more people get satnav, it might end up in a similar fashion

b) The amount of car horn honking in NY is just unbelievable. Does anybody think it actually HELPS, when the roads are congested? (On the positive side - the honking won me dinner in a bet - when I bet a colleague I travelled to NY with, that you'd probably still hear the honking on the viewing platform of the Empire State Building... Answer: EASILY)

c) The air quality along roads going in wind direction is good - the air quality in roads perpendicular to the direction of the wind gets horrible in no time at all (thanks to all the gas guzzlers on the road).

At the end of my first trip to NY, one of those prod american work mates (the kind that will tell you exactly whatever the f*ck they think) got fairly pissed at me - he asked me how I liked NY, and (with the high pound exchange rate at the time) I told him that I had finally learnt why living in London was more expensive than in NY: Because it's bl**dy worth it!
(That said, within many of my friends, most of them love NY, and don't understand why I don't love it... ...but for me - it's just not the city I'd ever wish to live in.)

Re:On the other hand...

[tehcyder]

in London, a lot of people won't drive a car, simply because you can get lost easily

No, that's not the main reason, except maybe for tourists - after all you get used to finding you way round anywhere once you live there for a while.

In London, the problem is the sheer weight of traffic, combined with narrow roads, such that the average speed is hardly much more than walking pace nowadays. I used to have a roughly ten mile cross-London commute, and it took about three quarters of an hour on amotorbike.

Except that it doesn't

[Kupfernigk]

We live in a semi-rural area (edge of a market town.) We buy everything local that we can (food we don't grow...) and everything else comes via the WWW. The postal service is highly reliable.

Unfortunately there are two factors against this: private companies that want to get rid of the PO so they can raise prices and profit, and the postal service in our awful cities. Politicians live in London, so they think everywhere is as bad as London and are willing to be persuaded that privatised post will be magically better. (When the privatised post has to travel the same delivery routes, and finds out, it will be too late.)

Slightly OT, our biggest problem is London-based pols believing that everywhere is like London and trying to fix what isn't broken, whether it is hospitals, schools, traffic or crime. High time we went for a Singapore solution.

Except that it does

[Anonymous Coward]

They lost my signed-for package with MY PASSPORT that I sent to the UK Visas office. And the assholes did not care about it... "uh oh... we will look for it.. you should try sending it again"

And because it is property of the saint british queen (and I am just an expat) there is no way I can sue them or try to get other compensation.

If it was a private company independent of the government I am sure they would make sure they get my darn package back.

Re:Except that it does

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was a private company independent of the government I am sure they would make sure they get my darn package back.

No, not really. UPS has lost a package for me before, and I was bounced between their insurance provider and the shipper for a couple of weeks before I got a refund. No idea where the hell the package ended up.

In theory private enterprise will be better than the government, but in practice it seems like incompetence is a universal constant.

It depends where you live

[rossdee]

If you live 100 miles or more from the big city, and your vehicle is an SUV, then you can bet getting your stuff online would use less gas and cause less CO2 emmissions. Fedex and UPS are fairly efficient at delivery since they have to be to make a profit.

I guess it would be different if you lived in a major city and drove a Prius..

uhh....

[tommut]

I don't believe any of us our shopping online in order to help save the planet in some small way. I'm pretty sure we do it because it allows us to shop without getting off our ass.

Just references to references to references...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm...
This claim seems to come from 199, if not further back.

A PDF link can be found to the IET report here:
        http://www.theiet.org/factfiles/transport/unintended-page.cfm (no pun intended).

If you look at the report, there is just a two line reference (around page 9) to an earlier 2002 article:
    Plepys, A. (2002) The Grey Side of ICT, Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 22: 509-523

Googling revealed a PDF copy of Plepys'article at:
          http://www.graduateinstitute.ch/aspd/wsis/DOC/200EN.PDF

Plepys article contains the the following paragraph of interest:
    "A Swedish study of household shopping showed that the environmental
    savings are reached if one e-commerce delivery replaces 3.5 traditional shopping
    trips, if more that 25 orders are delivered at a time, and if travel distance is longer
    than 50 km (Jönson et al., 1999)."

So - a Swedish paper from 1999.

Alas, I was unable to follow the chain further due to my lack of knowledge of Swedish.
A typical example of "scientific" results taking on a life of their own?

It's all about the Last Mile (or 50)

[Anonymous Coward]

> But one technology site notes the study was conducted in Britain, which could have an impact on its conclusions.

The real key difference is due to the "Last Mile" effects. That's where delivery economics has its Achille's Heal. Most of the costs are in the Last Mile which is also why suburbia is so inefficient and most sensitive to capital and energy costs as well. It's exactly these peripheral regions that have died first in the real estate crash: Last Mile effects are the primarily reason in addition to stupid geographical siting decisions.

Unfortunately, the USA is far more spread out so the last-mile costs (both monetary and energy) of online purchasing are far, far higher making the threshold for payback much higher. In some parts of the USA west it could easily be you'd need to buy 10x more or 250 items to break even on energy and operating costs.

The way my wife shops...

[Zarf]

'if online shopping replaces 3.5 traditional shopping trips, or if 25 orders are delivered at the same time, or, if the distance traveled to where the purchase is made is more than 50 kilometers.

The way my wife shops I think we completely exceed at least two of those criteria on each trip.

1. We commonly travel round-trip around 30 miles shopping.
2. We typically visit at least three stores approximately 5 miles apart before large purchases often cycling back to the first store before buying.
3. When we *do* buy online we typically save up a large number of purchases to the same online retailer before buying even with free shipping

Ironically, the "Shop Savvy" Android app means we now head out find an item, find it cheaper online then put it in a "buy queue" for later meaning we still drove but didn't buy.

I shall reconsider our shopping habits.

Vauban, Germany, carless planned-community

[h00manist]

http://www.livablestreets.com/streetswiki/vauban-freiburg-germany Vauban has only bicycles and a tram. Anyone having cars leaves them at the edge of the community.

Re:Vauban, Germany, carless planned-community

[ScrewMaster]

http://www.livablestreets.com/streetswiki/vauban-freiburg-germany [livablestreets.com] Vauban has only bicycles and a tram.

What about wheelchairs and Segways?

Re:Vauban, Germany, carless planned-community

[h00manist]

Well I suppose since streets are wide open with no cars ever, people must be going nuts with anything that has wheels. But I dunno, never been there.

Research was in Sweden in 1999!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The information about online shopping is taken from a Swedish research paper published in 1999.
The IET report simply cites an earlier report (Plepys, 2002). If you look at the Plepys report, it again just quotes the result from the Swedish paper (Joensen 1999).
Nothing to see here, just move along...

This is rediculous paid for report

[jabbathewocket]

It presumes a set of criteria that are illogical and impossible in the real world.. and is an effort to stem the tide of avoiding high street overcharging by shopping online where there is significantly more competition.

This info would only be partially true if delivery vehicles where dispatched from the distribution center to your house/office for ONLY your orders.. and not as is actual practice running routes that include not just your order from shop a, but in many cases hundreds of individual orders from hundreds of shops every single time the lorry leaves the distribution center.

Granted rural locations are likely not seeing 4-5 different delivery firms making full routes of the entire streetmap every single day.. but even so.. they seem to be comparing *cost of a normal vehicle for a family or individual" vs "cost of running a delivery lorry with nothing but 1 package on it" but even then the fact of the matter is that if a single car has to drive 30 km round trip and that takes a liter of petrol.. to purchase an ipod... it would have to cost the delivery service that same liter of petrol to deliver that single package to you.. which clearly it does not.. even if a lorry is only getting 10km per liter its likely delivering far more packages per liter than any personal vehicle is likely to accomplish.

In short this report is a paid for by city center/high street shopping interests who wish to maintain high margins by stemming the flow of sales away from online back to their high priced and highly inefficient retail locations.

Re:*thwack!* - Read the report before you comment.

[JustAClam]

This thing was pretty hard to find....It's interesting to me that the PRESS RELEASE (which doesn't reflect the report very well) generated 290 comments. Here's a link to download the actual report:

Rebound: unintended consequences of transport policy and technology innovations

Other factors

[npsimons]

So in the summary they mention that if it is shipped more than 50km it negates the argument. I know, I know, I should RTFA. But I have to ask: did they take into account people who order things online because they can't buy those things down the street? In my small town (approx 30k residents), we lack a lot of things. When Mervyn's closed here, all we had left for clothing stores were the local fashion botiques, K-Mart and Wal-Mart. Don't even get me started on places to buy computer equipment or things for other hobbies (we've got Staples for computer supplies, and they don't seem to understand the meaning of "will this work with Linux?").

I hate shopping at brick and mortars. Nine times out of ten, I know exactly what I want. I don't want to have to talk to someone who's trying to sell me a warranty, nor deal with someone who says "we're out of stock for (hardware that works with Linux), but we have this great (windows only piece of shit)!". My actions are better for the environment, because the shipping companies will naturally try to batch more packages into less shipments to increase profits, instead of me and everyone else in my town driving 90 minutes to buy something. Even if you carpool with five people per car and stuff the car to the gills with things you buy, you still won't beat a UPS van full of packages. And that's assuming they used the smaller vans on the highways instead of the big rigs I've seen. Plus, my commute to work is 4 miles; 15 minutes by car, 18 by bicycle. So overall, I would say that small towns are better for the environment.

it appears that the study

[alizard]

generalizes to ... a city whose streets were routed at random a few hundred years ago and which was never converted to a more or less standard grid. There are no cities in America that I know of that fit that description.

The real question about the study for you is whether you are buying into the conclusions of a study paid for by Big Oil ... or somebody's auto industry.

Doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

online shopping is here to stay. people are setting up sites for everything, from the small fitness shop down the street to your optometrist selling contact lenses http://www.lensopolis.com at great prices.

You're going to go to the store anyway.

[tomhudson]

It's not like you can get milk, eggs, meds, etc. through Amazon - or that they'll ship something you need NOW. Got poison ivy? Do you really want to wait 2 to 4 days to get that lotion? Scratch that!

Re:*thwack!* - Read the report before you comment.

[ScrewMaster]

It's interesting to me that the PRESS RELEASE (which doesn't reflect the report very well) generated 290 comments.

You do realize what site this is. Most of us just read the summary and jump in (I know this because most of us have no idea what we're talking about.) That's part of makes this place so entertaining: we can get up on a soapbox, tell people they're idiots, express opinions reasonable or otherwise, even just tell a story we think others might find interesting ... all spewn forth from a single paragraph at the top. It is kinda impressive.