Grocery Delivery Lowers Carbon Dioxide Emissions Over Individual Trips

vinces99 writes "Those trips to the store can take a chunk out of your day and put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But now University of Washington engineers have found that using a grocery delivery service can cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least half when compared with individual household trips to the store. Trucks filled to capacity that deliver to customers clustered in neighborhoods produced the most savings in carbon dioxide emissions, but there are even benefits with delivery to rural areas."

Comments

Only true for a small portion of the world

[prefec2]

When I go to the grocery, I walk there. I doubt that any delivery service can be more efficient. However, to be able to shop in that way, the supermarket must be not more than 10-20 min away from home (by foot or by bike).

 

Re:Only true for a small portion of the world

[xelah]

Not if the reason you're doing it is because you don't own a car, and yet live within walking distance.

so I can't choose my own food?

[r00t]

I want the milk that is newest, the meat without marbling, the pear without bruises, and the beets without rotting leaves.

I'm sure it benefits the store to provide me whatever is oldest and/or least desired. If I don't buy more food to compensate, throwing out half of it, there may even be an environmental benefit. (less food waste if people eat the moldy food) No thanks. I want the good stuff.

Re:so I can't choose my own food?

[goodmanj]

In my experience, the grocery delivery services know that you're going to be super-suspicious about low-quality food, and make a point of giving you the best stuff. They advertise this heavily, and from what I've seen it's true. (Their financial incentive to give you crap food is smaller than their financial incentive to operate fewer expensive retail stores.)

Also, keep in mind that if they're delivering from a central warehouse rather than a retail location, the food won't have been sitting out shriveling on a display shelf for three days before you buy it.

WebVan, Safeway, substitution, and allergens

[tlambert]

Congratulations, now go make^H^H^H^Hlose a billion $$$!

Safeway is starting to offer this as a service; however, like WebVan, they reserve the right to substitute "equivalent" goods when they feel it's necessary.

When WebVan did that, we ended up with something with peanut oil in it instead of canola oil, which it's lucky we caught, or someone could have died.

When Safeway does it, it's going to be replacing name brands with Safeway brands, and it is more or less *always* be necessary, since they are sending the vans from the distribution center, which only stocks a few name brands. Toilet tissue? You get Safeway. Kleenex? You get Safeway tissue.

The asinine thing is that Safeway *already* does not use the frequency marketing card data to datamine it and say to themselves "Hmmmm... this card never buys anything containing peanuts, and hasn't for 10 years; let's flag them so that if they accidentally get something that has peanuts in it, they get an 'are you sure?' at the checkout". This despite the databases they already have on product ingredients and everything the card has *ever* been used to buy make this type of mining *trivial*.

Instead, the assholes print out $0.50 off coupons for exactly the products that we've been avoiding for 10 years, every time we buy an "equivalent" non-store brand version of the item. Of course it's cleverly based on the fact that on our next trip we are likely to be picking up one of the "equivalent" products that don't contain what amounts to rat poison, or might as well, for the allergic person.

Seriously, this is a stupid idea.