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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."
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).
Will this grocery delivery service discriminate against "atheist" foods?
All foods are atheist. At least, I've never met or heard of any food that claimed that it believed in a god.
Feel free to provide evidence that theist foods exist - after all - extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
If you live deep in surburbia walking isn't an option as the nearest grocery store may be more than a couple of km away. And if you are shopping for a family, cycling isn't an option because of the load you have to haul back.
But if you happen to be single and/or living within 20 min walk of a grocery store, have at it.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
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.
You mean..... walk? How?
Joking aside, the near ubiquitous adoption of cars has made walking untenable in many situations of daily shopping errands due to the distance between them. Biking would work in most situations, but you try carrying 60 pounds of groceries on a bike, maybe if you had a bike trailer, but I'm guessing you don't.
TFH (headline) mentions specifically that it is more efficient than single individual trips. It does not make any comparison to public transport. Honestly Slashdot, sometimes...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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I ride my bike to pick up my groceries like most sane people.
That's great for you; single-person-urbanite-centric much? ;)
I used to do the same when I was a student and lived relatively close to the supermarkets. A few years down the line, I/we shop for three people once a week. That can be a good forty kilos depending on what we buy.
A little more on topic - and perhaps more importantly, these grocery deliveries also save *time* - life's most important resource.
All foods are atheist. At least, I've never met or heard of any food that claimed that it believed in a god.
Depends on your definition of "food".
Here's my grocery getter, loaded down with groceries. I doubt that truck beats me in the carbon department.
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In other news, when everyone in a neighbourhood packs into a bus, which delivers them to work and returns them home in the evening, the result will be a reduction in carbon dioxide into the atmosphere vs everyone driving themselves.
News at 11.
At produce returns may have some impact both profits and carbon dioxide...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
True on a world-wide scale. However, in the US, 32% of CO2 emissions is from transportation. It's harder to find numbers on motor vehicles in the US, but the closest I get within 3 minutes of Google is almost a quarter of annual US emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). (...) The US transportation sector emits more CO2 than all but three other countries' emissions from all sources combined.
Unfortunately, it looks like there is no simple way to reduce CO2 emissions. Just saying "just cut all the CO2 sources except the my car, my airconditioning, and my incandescent bulbs" is a bit too easy.
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They make no mention of public transportation because that would point a finger at one of the many gaping holes in their premise. Constraining your problem areas to a very tiny subset does not make your research any more valid...
Hahahahahahaha hahaha.... Hahahaha... Wait a second while I peel myself off the floor here. Heh... Okay, what was that you were saying about private transportation being a tiny "very tiny subset" of people's transport usage? Also, the equation you gave your third-grader is wrong; you need separate variables for distance1 and distance2, and at that point the equation is not solvable until you do some research to determine what those distances would be in various real-world situations. Like, say, the research described in TFA.
If you want to be even more efficient how about you do a "Foxconn" - live, eat, etc at your workplace and do away with most grocery trips completely.
The thing is, if you want to do this without sacrificing quality of life (which the actual Foxconn employees certainly do), you need to put a *lot* of stuff on the workplace's campus. Single-family housing, apartments, medical facilities, food, movie theaters, playgrounds, legal offices, accountants, education, police ... all this stuff takes up space, so your campus starts to sprawl over square miles, people start buying cars to get across campus, and then you've got to provide auto sales and service ...
And pretty soon you've invented the "town". Large domestic U.S. military bases are a great example of how this happens in practice.
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.
That sounds like a much bigger problem with American drivers than with cyclists.
What kind of person feels obligated to harass someone else because they don't agree with the way they choose to get around or live their lives?
Hannibal... is that you?
I'd not trust them to pick the best they could find of the veggies, or the most well marbled pieces of beef...I'd expect the store would pick according to its own best interest, which would be rotating all oldest food out first.
When I go shopping, I like to touch the veggies, I want to feel if an avocado is nearly ripe or past its prime or hard as a rock.
You know, I'm just not THAT worried about being a little greener, when it comes at the cost of my getting the best food I can for my money.Besides, I usually do all my shopping on ONE day. I find the sale ads in my city, and hit about 2-3 stores to get the best deals on what's on sale that week....and come home to cook for the week.
What store is going to do THAT for me? With my one weekly trip, how much carbon could I possibly be using?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........