Slashdot Mirror
The Hidden Environmental Cost of Amazon Prime's Free, Fast Shipping (buzzfeednews.com)
Amazon's Prime Day shopping spree offers free, fast shipping -- but experts say there's a hidden environmental cost that doesn't show up on the checkout page. From a report: Expedited shipping means your packages may not be as consolidated as they could be, leading to more cars and trucks required to deliver them, and an increase in packaging waste, which researchers have found is adding more congestion to our cities, pollutants to our air, and cardboard to our landfills. Free and fast shipping has always been a Prime membership's marquee perk -- one that's drawn in over 100 million subscribers who pay $119 annually. A 2017 study by UPS found that nearly all (96%) US customers had made a purchase on a marketplace like Amazon or Walmart, and over half (55%) said free or discounted shipping was the primary reason.
[...] That convenience is encouraging people in the US to buy more, and to make more individual purchases rather than placing a single order for several items. "There are more sales in lower-price products online than there have been in stores," Marshal Cohen, chief industry advisor at the NPD Group, told BuzzFeed News. And all of those transactions are negatively impacting our planet, according to Miguel Jaller, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis: "People are consuming more. There's more demand created by the availability of these cheap products and cheap delivery options."
[...] That convenience is encouraging people in the US to buy more, and to make more individual purchases rather than placing a single order for several items. "There are more sales in lower-price products online than there have been in stores," Marshal Cohen, chief industry advisor at the NPD Group, told BuzzFeed News. And all of those transactions are negatively impacting our planet, according to Miguel Jaller, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis: "People are consuming more. There's more demand created by the availability of these cheap products and cheap delivery options."
Small items cost more on Prime than they do at Walmart. The costs are right there for anybody who understands the Price Mechanism as an element of basic economics.
Oh, wait, it's *fucking Buzzfeed* on /. again. GDI.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It was shipped in a box bigger than two car batteries.
Best environmental solution -- live in a city where you can walk or bike to the store. Delivery to stores is centralized and generally less environmentally costly than stopping at every suburban house. Walking or biking to pick up your goods is also less environmentally impactful than driving. (And yes, it's possible to do this with a family -- many people outside the US live that way, and it works well.)
Ordering more stuff online, spread out over even more separate deliveries causes more resources to be used to ship the extra stuff you're ordering more often.
I'm not sure what this guy is whinging about. From About Shipping Preferences: (emphasis mine)
Every time you place an order via the Shopping Cart that contains more than one delivery date, you can choose for your order to be shipped in the fewest possible packages or for your order to be shipped as soon as each item it becomes available.
You can change your shipping preferences in Your Account at any time after placing your order as long as the order hasn’t entered the shipping process yet.
Prime Customers
FREE Delivery in fewest possible packages
This is a free shipping option for Prime members purchasing Prime eligible items that are in stock. Your Prime orders will be consolidated into the fewest number of packages possible and may take longer to ship depending on product availability.
I want my items faster. Ship each item as soon as it becomes available
This is also a free shipping option for Prime members purchasing Prime eligible items that are in stock. Your Prime items ship as they become available. You should choose this option if you want to receive each item as fast as possible.
There are similar options for non-Prime customers.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If you're not a religious environmentalist, your Amazon packages aren't a sin.
This is a classic misunderstanding of opportunity cost. Comparing the scenarios as if the alternative is for the packages to materialize in your house via a Star Trek-style transporter and zero pollution.
If Amazon weren't shipping the items to you, you would probably drive to a local store to buy it. Multiple stores if you're buying a variety of things. In the vast majority of cases, that will burn more fuel and cause more pollution than delivery via UPS. The average UPS driver makes about 120 deliveries a day, driving about 150 miles. So total vehicle-miles per package is only about 1.25 miles. (The longer cross-state transport would've happened anyway delivering the item you bought to your local store.)
The excess packaging part I agree with. I peeves me that when Amazon is running promotions like their "$1 digital credit for slower shipping", it's per order rather than per item, or per $x spent. It encourages me to save my items for later, and purchase them one at a time, rather than put them all in one order which can be shipped in a single box. To their credit, I've found that if I place multiple orders in rapid succession, they're smart enough to consolidate all of them into a single shipment.
I started using Amazon Locker and will probably use that exclusively for everything that is eligible. It's faster and probably better for the environment as it's one less address they have to deliver to. Plus it's one less middle man and one less opportunity for the package to be stolen. They could also probably ditch the boxes as well when using locker, or use reusable containers or something. I don't need the box, just my stuff that's in the box.
Is it more or less polluting to have them sent with fast shipping versus all them people physically driving to the locations to pick up those items?
Just because it isn't carbon free doesn't mean it is more pollution than the alternatives. Especially for stuff people are trying to get in a hurry.
Also, the more people do this, the more economical it gets I would assume due to the economies of scale and more people going through the same channels.
9 out of 10 packages that I get from Amazon come via USPS now along with the rest of the junk mail that they were gonna bring me one way or another.
you're late as usual. Some have been trying to alert people to this very fact for years. Of course 'now' it's a thing, because "experts" say so. Groovy.
You're burning gasoline, which dumps stuff in the atmosphere. You're using public roads, which are heavily subsidized. The people who work at WalMart are also getting food stamps or other welfare. All that for a $1.39 tube of toothpaste.
Face it, we're connected as hell. Everyfuckingthing we do has hidden costs. Get over with it, it's called modern living.
I have no idea how the Amazon system compares to the Walmart system environmentally and taking one element of the system and making a comparison does not help to rectify that. In fact, this was cherry-picked in a big way. What about some of the other factors?
What's the environmental costs of everyone individually driving to Walmart to pick up goods as opposed to trucks delivering to many people in one pass through a route?
The brick and mortar system has a lot more, well, brick and mortar that has a remarkably short lifetime and takes up much space. Amazon has about 150 fulfillment centers to Walmart's 175 or so distribution centers and 4000+ stores over 3000 of which are in the 140,000 sq ft size range. Walmarts buildings plus parking lots cover over 90 square miles. All of those buildings and parking lots have an environmental cost.
It also appears to be less employee efficient even counting delivery personnel. The total of all Amazon and all UPS employees is less than half of Walmart's while sales have surpassed the halfway point. The environmental cost of the lives of the employees involved should be counted in a full accounting of the cost of an industry. An industry is nothing without employees.
I do not believe that brick and mortar, in general, will ever measure up to delivery if you really dig into the full system environmental costs.
The "hidden" cost they're talking about is NOT reflected in the price.
Anyone who's ever read Friedrich Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" should know: externalities apart, some way, somehow any extra environmental burden (read: resource usage) will be worked into the price. Trucks can't drive around extra miles at US$0 / mile cost. No matter how cheap the gas or how little they pay their drivers.
Maybe prices don't differentiate between environmentally efficient or wasteful options. Maybe there are some externalities that enable Amazon to ship goods cheaper than they should be. But gas still costs money. Electricity too. More trucking miles = more trucks needed, more driver time, and more maintenance to do on those trucks. And with Amazon being a for-profit company, those extra costs will have to be recouped somehow. Either in higher prices for products, or higher prices for premium services.
So grandparent is right. The only thing (possibly) hidden is how end-user pricing is calculated.
Don't forget on top of that Amazon has a number of products that ship in low-waste packaging, whereas if I bought from Target or Walmart I'd be buying a package with quite a lot more plastic aimed at theft and tampering prevention.
I think that balances out the extra boxes you may get from time to time (which are not as bad for landfills as other things).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Indeed, it is all around worse for me to drive to Fry's. It's worse environmentally for everyone to drive to Fry's rather than have a single truck carry all the items to their neighborhood. It's worse in terms of spending my time and money driving to Fry's and hoping it's in stock.
Lowest cost, both environmental cost and dollar cost, may be ordering at Walmart.com and picking up at the local Walmart store while I'm already there getting groceries. The delivery trucks are already driving to Walmart. So the environmental cost is approximately zero that way. Similarly for the economic cost. I'm already going to Walmart anyway, so there is no additional cost for picking up an item I ordered while I'm there.
The potential downside to ordering at Walmart.com and picking up at the store happens when I need the item in 24-48 hours. Walmart.com is often not the fastest method.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Extra packaging and van miles are NOT externalities. These are things Amazon, etc. pay for. No, they don't simply pass it along to the consumer, because if they can find a way to mitigate the extra expense, they will. That's what they're good at. If it simply cost that much more in packaging and gasoline every time, they wouldn't offer the free shipping. So what's the real environmental objection? It's that it increases the amount of stuff people buy in the first place. You know, the thing Amazon is there to do. But of course, that's equivalent to saying that economic activity is itself a bad thing...which in turn is at the core of the ideology of the left.
Every day, in and out, they're ALWAYS making out that American tech companies are evil. EVERY single day. I really think somebody is paying them off, and trying to use PR to damage the tech industry.
Amazon has a good business model. It has made legions of consumers happy, and made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world. Pretty cool, huh? Don't change a thing.
If you don't like it, then you swishing Euro fruits can kiss by ass.
Having extra food around is not âoehoardingâ, itâ(TM)s common sense as anyone who has had to ride out a bad storm could tell you...
Having some bulk food items (like a huge bag of rice) not only gives you a lot of margin for eating, it can also save you a ton of money (as long as you are careful not to buy anything youâ(TM)ll waste much of)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Save the cardboard boxes for the fire pit" my wife says. 15 years later I'm renting a 30YD dumpster and filling it to the top with flattened rat shit/piss Amazon boxes.
When leftists can accept massacres as long as the perpetrator supports their ideology, they can also accept pollution as long as the perpetrator supports their ideology.
This has been going on for years, and gone nowhere, and will keep going on, and go nowhere. Amazon is safe because they are on the same side as the media.
You don't know my sister! Loves to shop, loves it. Groceries at least twice a week. A trip to the mall twice a week. Costco three times a month. Then there are the specialty shops and the book store.
Fine, but she's a terrible driver. Terrible, and she puts a LOT of miles on that tired old Honda. Her mind seems to wander, just as her lane wanders as she passes from one stop light to another. I gotta tell you it's a frightening thing to watch.
Her friends and I are trying to wean her from the car as a matter of public safety. We talk about the joys of Amazon Prime and Next Day Delivery and the fun of opening packages when they arrive. We talk about the dangers of 'other' drivers during her travels and the rising cost of insurance and other auto expenses. It's not easy to get her off the road, but maybe Amazon can do it.
Would you rather share the road with her, and twenty like her, or with a single Amazon driver?
...omphaloskepsis often...
We use it all the time. I'd much rather get one box then several spread out over multiple days. I don't care if it delays things a few days. The only exception is when I need something immediately and I can't get it from a local store.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
People eat meat - bar for land environment.
People eat fish - bad for oceans environment
People emit carbon dioxide - bad for climate.
The solution is obvious - fewer people not changing Amazon's shipping policies.
because I got tired of going to a store to find them and either not finding them or having to search for half an hour-45 minutes because stores like to hide such things so I'll go all over and maybe pick up 5 or 6 other things.
Brick & Mortar Stores did several things that have pushed me away. First, they used computers to figure out exactly what sells and only stock that. Meaning if I want something that folks don't buy every single day I've got to go online, and if I'm going online I might as well skip the trip. Second, they took the "milk at the back of the store" philosophy to crazy heights and put everything I buy routinely at the maximum distance from each other, making shopping an all around miserable experience. Oh, and they massively understaff their stores to save money on wages (while cutting pay and benefits) meaning everybody at any store I shop at is just as miserable as I am.
Is it any wonder I avoid shopping in stores as much as possible?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The CO2 output from Amazon offering speedy delivery instead of lumping deliveries together is nothing on the grand scheme. Here's a 50 year plan to halve the CO2 output of the USA.
The plan I propose has two prongs, electricity and transportation. For electricity start building nuclear power plants. The USA currently has 1000 GW of electricity generation capacity, 100 GW is currently nuclear. That 10% of generation capacity provides 20% of our electricity consumed. How can that be? Because nuclear power plants are run with over 90% capacity factor while coal is barely above 50%, and the rest of the generation capacity is 40% or lower. If we build one gigawatt of new nuclear generation capacity per month in the USA then we should be able to replace all or most the old coal and nuclear we have in 50 years. Add in some wind and hydro then we'd have very low carbon electricity in the USA.
Why 50 years? Why one new gigawatt reactor per month? We could do it faster but building nuclear power at a rate of double we had in the 1970s and 1980s should be doable and a relatively low bar to clear. This isn't adding new capacity, except by the higher capacity factor that nuclear offers. If we want to also add capacity above that then that means more nuclear sooner or making up the difference with wind and hydro. Oh, and we can't stop building new nuclear reactors after 50 years. The typical operational life span of a nuclear reactor is 50 years so the reactors we build today will need to be replaced at that time.
The second part of my proposal is to address the CO2 output of transportation. Even though electric passenger cars are popular they have range problems (or rather "range anxiety" problems) and passenger cars make up only a small part of the CO2 produced. I propose conversion of as many vehicles as possible to natural gas. NG fuels vehicles reduce CO2 output per mile by 30%. While that might not seem great compared to electric what it does have is that people would actually buy them. Since we'd be using nuclear power for our electricity then there should be plenty of NG to go around.
Where would people get their NG cars and trucks fueled up? At first this could be at home filling systems, much like how electric cars are charged up now in places where public charging stations are not available. Many homes already have NG service and so this would be no more an expense than adding an electric outlet for an electric car. For large trucks dual fuel options are a currently available technology and they can burn diesel when they must and NG when they can. There is an extensive NG network in the USA and filling stations all over the country should be able to tap into that to fuel up vehicles.
Trains can be converted to NG or electricity. Ships at sea might not be able to be converted to NG but large cargo ships can be converted to nuclear. Planes need kerosene, and I don't see that changing soon. We can research alternatives but in the mean time we'll keep pumping oil out of the ground for that. Most likely alternative is synthetic hydrocarbons from wind, hydro, and nuclear, but that means additional capacity for those to make up for the loss of energy from petroleum.
There's my plan. With transportation being about 30% of USA CO2 output, and transportation being about 40%, the use of nuclear and natural gas instead of coal and oil should give us at least a 50% reduction in CO2 output. I don't expect it to happen because the US federal government has been sitting on their thumbs for issuing nuclear power plant licenses for 40 years. This tells me they are not taking the problem seriously.
The NG that comes into your house is barely above atmospheric pressure. The NG tank for a vehicle is above 2000 psi. You have to compress that which takes a very specialized compressor.which is VERY inefficient and power hungry.
There should be a package delivery service which focuses on moving packages within a metro area, and delivers in a day or two. Or, at least has special local pricing. UPS seems like the best match for this. Most of USPS' cargo is lots of small packages (first class mail). This local delivery service should offer discounts for customer bulk pickup, or delivery, to their warehouses.
For most items if i could schedule a weekly delivery I would.
Also, they could have reusable containers that could be picked up on recycle day or even the next delivery
None of this is that hard, the cost is upfront, maintenance costs will happen, but eventually better than what we are doing today
The NG that comes into your house is barely above atmospheric pressure.
Then tap off the NG for the cars before the regulator, the street service line is likely 200 PSI.
The NG tank for a vehicle is above 2000 psi.
A quick Google search tells me it's more like 3000 PSI.
You have to compress that which takes a very specialized compressor.which is VERY inefficient and power hungry.
Then build filling stations that can take advantage of economies of scale, and can tap off a feeder line that runs as high as 1500 PSI. The choices people have now for cars in the USA are limited to gasoline and electric. People aren't buying electric because they don't like the idea of having to take hours for a recharge, they don't have quick charge stations available to them, and/or they can't have a car charger at home (such as for people that rent or have an older home with substandard electrical service).
CNG is not perfect, but it's better than gasoline or diesel fuel.
I recall someone talking about people protesting the importation of endangered species to a ranch in the USA. The rancher was going to breed the animals in a large fenced off ranch and sell tickets for people to go on a "safari" to hunt them. The alternative was to leave the animals in Africa where they would likely go extinct from poachers and predators. They brought the protesters on TV to interview them and they looked like idiots, arguing that the animals should stay where they are. They didn't want them hunted, because hunting is "bad". The rancher explained that unless he could make money off the animals then he could not afford to breed them, and the ones he already imported would have to be euthanized or set out in the wild to die. Nope, they argued, can't have that, there must be no hunting.
These kind of people will get us all killed trying to save the environment.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Why not beef up the Amazon Locker program, in which Amazon delivers to lockers placed in a local store. If Amazon were to buy out a chain of gas station convenience stores, which it could do or couch cushion change, each location could be both an Amazon pickup point and a place to get the sort of last-minute essentials that such stores normally carry. This would be an especially good deal for the young working people who are usually not home when the UPS man comes.
There's no free lunch! Shipping companies don't work for free. When Amazon or any other mail order vendor does not pay the FeEX, UPS, USPS or other shipper, then I'll believe shipping is free. And then there's the environmental costs of getting a product to the purchaser.
A correct statement would be, "Shipping cost included in purchase price." I believe this statement, or something that says the same thing, should be required by law for mail order vendors not including a shipping cost in the invoice.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
If a truck delivers to ten houses, that's better than ten people traveling to the store.
Fucking morons.
If it leads to more vehicles, then it's hard to totally hide the price unless Amazon is selling at a loss (e.g. the stockholders are paying the price for you, in which case it's still not hidden).
If the stockholders are really not paying it -- if they've found a way to drive two vehicles for the cost of one, then it means that a subsidy is happening. And if that's the case, it's less of a problem with Amazon than vehicles in general. e.g. we are probably also paying environmental externalies whenever I, who don't happen to work as a delivery driver, go to the nearby fast food restaurant and buy a burrito instead of just making something frmo what I have in my fridge. So that raises the question: why are you subsidizing my burrito run? And why am I subsidizing yours? (Whatever the case, Amazon is just taking advantage of this existing subsidy that we've all agreed to have.)
Worry less about Amazon and worry more about subsidized pollution in general. Handle the pollution subsidies and you'll be helping to correct whatever Amazon is doing, too.
I hate these types of "studies", because it's inevitably just someone trying to think up another reason the environment is getting destroyed, without looking at the bigger picture.
Whether you use "expedited shipping" or not, the shipper gets paid their negotiated rate to deliver that box. Part of the way the shipper makes it cost effective is by ensuring the delivery truck is as full as possible. There are enough packages going around so they're going to accomplish that consistently, regardless of if your particular order has been consolidated into one box or not.
If you're simply arguing that receiving your order in separate boxes creates more waste? I'd say that first of all, the Amazon boxes I've seen are typically put into recycling bins, so they're not just adding to landfills. (If they are, then you need to take that up with the recycling company, who is apparently not really doing what they say they're doing.) But second? I suspect many, many people do what I do with these boxes; hang onto most of them to re-use them when we ship things back out! Before Amazon, I sometimes had to actually pay for a shipping box before I could send a product out to a buyer on eBay or elsewhere. Now, I almost always have a suitably sized box on-hand from the Prime boxes I saved in my garage. I reuse the packing material inside the boxes too.
when a business is positioning itself to become a monopoly. Amazon doesn't make enough money to satisfy a normal shareholder. They're being allowed to bring in very little profit relative to their size with the understanding that once their competitors are out of business they can charge whatever they want.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
My dear AC:
You seem to be a Concerned Person! The following link leads to an excellent volunteer opportunity that you may be interested in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement
Please consider your choices carefully and make them forthrightly -for Yourself. Please allow others the dignity of making their own choices.
If two items are coming from the same warehouse, they will DEFINITELY be consolidated if you buy from Amazon.
There are two reasons and two reasons alone Amazon will break up an order.
1) The items are not all coming from the same warehouse
2) The items are available in the same warehouse, but it costs less to break up the shipments due to weight/volume/fuel considerations.
As an example of #2, if you live in New York and order a pack of pencils (6 ounces) and an indoor exercise bike (75 lbs) that are both in a warehouse in California, but there is also an exercise bike in a warehouse in New Jersey, and the pencils are only in the warehouse in California, you are getting the pencils from California and the bike from New Jersey. Every time.
Amazon has explained this over, and over, and over, and over again to the crazy environmental left. Amazon doesn't send more than one package unless it absolutely has to, and if it does, it is always to reduce the cost (both financial and environmental) of doing business.
99% of the time, my packages are delivered via USPS... which makes a trip to my house 6 days a week already. The only time an extra vehicle is involved is when it is Sunday.
And as someone else pointed out, the volume effect works in the environment's favor like mass transit. They're not going to send out 1 vehicle for each package. There will be much, much more. So which is more environmentally friendly? The USPS dispatching 4 vans to deliver 25 packages each (total 100) or have 100 people drive individually to get to the store(s) they could buy the items locally.
Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch
Umm, did nobody see this "study" was done by UPS,the guys that DON'T ship their stuff?
In theory, yes, there could be a higher environmental cost to making small deliveries. But then the delivery driver's route will depend on what else they are delivering. Marginally, there is only a small environmental cost of going from one stop to the next. Regardless of whether you've bought anything or not, there is likely to be a delivery van in your neighbourhood on any given day.
And even that cost can be reduced by the delivery firm investing in lower emission vehicles.
Compare that to the emissions and the traffic caused by people choosing to drive to their "local" stores instead.
WTF? And you guys keep wondering why Trump won? I can see the snarky, obsequious, virtue signaling in the tone. That, people, is the utter nonsense that got his orangeness in chief elected. We need to tone it down a little. Way more important things exist to get your panties in a bunch over, than the miniscule environmental cost of amazon prime shipping.
I needed a car charger for my phone and the ones in the back of the store were $10-$15 and the ones at the cash register were $6. Go figure.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Last night I bought a battery on amazon and was offered free two day shipping. Upon purchase I noticed a welcome to Prime sign which, upon clicking, gave little intimation that I had somehow joined Prime but it raised my suspicions so I started looking around and i was about to be charged $12.99/month for something i didn't agree to join. Fuck Amazon and fuck Prime.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
...of all the cars that are NOT on the road burning gas, polluting the air because people are shopping online instead. That's a LOT of cars,SUVs,etc. We all save gas buying online instead of running around the town buying stuff.