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You may have already suspected this, but a recent study by Carnegie Mellon University's Green Design Institute avers that shopping online has less of an environmental impact than going to a traditional bricks-and-mortar store.
A team of six researchers came to that conclusion after conducting a life cycle comparison of e-commerce and traditional retail transactions involving an electronic product.
The transaction studied was the purchase of a flash drive and its journey from the manufacturer ultimately to the customer's home. The e-commerce business that was focused upon in the study was Buy.com, a member of the Green Design Consortium at Carnegie Mellon's Green Design Institute.
Researchers found that Buy.com's business model for such a transaction involved 35 percent less energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions than a traditional retail shopping model.
The study also identified the factors in each transaction model that sucked up the most energy and caused the greatest release of CO2. For the traditional retail model that was customer transport to and from stores, which accounted for 65 percent of the overall emissions resulting from the transaction. For the e-commerce model, packaging and last-mile delivery consumed the most energy and emitted the greatest amount of CO2.
A key advantage for the Buy.com model is that goods are shipping directly from distribution partners to customers. In contrast, the traditional model typically involves the shipment of products from distributors to regional warehouses and from the warehouses to retail sites, where items are purchased and then taken home by customers.
A copy of the study can be downloaded by clicking here (pdf).
How about not shopping at all?
Personally I shop online all the time, for almost everything I buy. Probably because I hate shopping in stores and loathe shopping malls. However, nothing could be greener than simply buying less stuff.
When I do buy, I'm more tempted to buy something used from Craigslist. My girlfriend and I conjectured that you could have a pretty good life confining all material purchases to yard sales. You could probably buy all your furniture, appliances, clothes, books and sporting goods by simply purchasing (and in a sense recycling) useful items that people typically throw out at an alarming rate.
I have one friend (a pack rat) whom we conjectured it would take two five-ton garbage containers just to haul away all the crap lying around her house. How is it that we've become a society with such a huge per person JUNK FOOTPRINT?
I walk through Walmart and I see most of the stuff as an additional to a USELESS JUNK. They retail NEW YARD SALE ITEMS.
Maybe I read too much Henry David Thoreau or Thorstein Veblen as a college student. All this junk people have DISGUSTS ME. Can our nation stop buying - or are we ADDICTED TO JUNK?