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."

Comments

Best environmental solution: urbanism

[b0s0z0ku]

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.)

Ya, but ...

[fahrbot-bot]

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.

Not quite accurate

[Solandri]

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

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.

NOT hidden

[Alwin Henseler]

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.

Re:NOT hidden

[bhiestand]

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...

To the GP's point, the article is about environmental externalities.

Re:NOT hidden

[mspohr]

The problem is that fossil fuel use has externalities in CO2, NOx and particulates which cause climate change and damage health.
In spite of Hayek's hypothesis, this is not worked into the price. The cost of health and environmental damage is placed on all of society and never works its way back to the price you pay.

Re:NOT hidden

[rtb61]

The problem is, you either get in your car, drive to the shop, park it in the forest destroying car park, go to the store, wait for service, get service, chat for some time, but the product, carry it back to your car and drive your whole car (the delivery packaging) with one fucking package and one person, back home. That will never economically or environmentally compete with ordering online, package goes from warehouse, to delivery vehicle with many, many other packages and only makes a one way journey, a route with deliveries on route and the final delivery should return closer to the warehouse for efficiency. Delivery vans, based upon cyclic use et al and a flat floor, slow speed and constant acceleration and deceleration, plus a large flat roof, make for excellent electric vehicle design and that solar panel does count once it pays for itself, it still generates revenue, direct tax free revenue.

Direct deliveries from logistic centres is far more efficient ie from factory (no outgoing warehousing required), to logistic centre (for picking and packing), to the consumer. So you put retail workers out of work but the whole retail centre, the land used, the energy used, the building, also are not required, that land could be a park with trees (but of course less reality, the city itself does not need to grow as much to provide the infrastructure space for that retail space. The retail chain style simply can not economically nor environmentally compete with the logistic chain style. You just need more logistics companies to jump into retail and provide competition and shrink Amazon down to a manageable for the rest of society scale. Unkowledgeable women writing fantasy rubbish is utterly pointless. The kind of stupid stuff like "However, people arenâ(TM)t offsetting the traffic to shopping malls and grocery stores by buying online" is a stupid as fuck, so they buy that product online and go to the mall to what not buy that product, what the fuck are they doing in the mall if the already bought that product, probably buying something fucking else, or for a meal or the cinema. Nobody does both, it's fucking nuts, you do not buy online and they go to a mall to not buy the product, you do one or the other for that product.