Think Twice Before You Order Online

20

September

2021

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More and more people are buying products online. With the COVID-19 pandemic, this trend only increased. Online retail sales in 2020 increased with 32,4% compared to 2019 [1]. Statista estimated that in 2021, more than 2.1 billion people worldwide are shopping online [2]. E-commerce has a lot of advantages for both consumers and retailers. Retailers can reach more consumers and those consumers have the convenience of ordering products without leaving their homes. But how does online shopping affect the environment?

If you look at the basic principles, online shopping is more environmentally friendly than buying products in a store. The main reason for this is that individuals don’t have to drive to stores to get their products [3], but that they are being delivered by vans which can optimize their routes for other customers. Next to that, less physical stores also mean less energy needed to power those buildings.

However, online shopping is not all rainbows and sunshine. The last years, retailers have focused on improving their last-mile delivery – the journey from the store or distribution center to the customer. Free shipping or same day delivery are being offered by more and more retailers nowadays. This rat race to make online shopping as convenient as possible, has a negative environmental impact. Customers order fewer items per online transaction leading to more shipment movements. Also, multi-item orders are often split because they have to be shipped from multiple stores or distribution centers and shipping via e-commerce requires additional packing [3]. Returns make things even worse. More than 30% of products bought online are returned, compared to just 9% in physical stores [4]. This new style of shopping not only leads to more parcels that need to be shipped back, but it also causes unnecessary waste of unused and undamaged products. Reports show that over 25% of returns are destroyed immediately, especially within the clothing industry [5]. Amazon destroys millions of items in their UK warehouses each year [6]. It’s often cheaper for companies to just destroy the returns instead of sorting out what’s wrong and repacking them, but the environment is paying the price.

Of course, you can still order products online. And if you keep some simple things in mind you can still have a smaller environmental impact compared to physical shopping. Below you can find some of these remarks, but feel free to add additional ones in the comments!

  • If you can buy your product in a physical store which you can reach walking or cycling, just go to the store.
  • If you’re unsure if the size is correct or if you want to keep the product, go to a physical store and find out.
  • Try to bundle your (future) purchases in one order.

References

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Digital is More Sustainable, or is it not?

4

October

2020

No ratings yet. Growing concerns around climate change and the impact of human activities on global warming has resulted in a global trend of organizations adopting CSR / sustainability policies. Simultaneously, digital technologies were becoming more and more prominent in most organizations. Consequently, digital technologies changed the way business is done in a lot of industries by moving business processes online. These two trends resulted in numerous companies making ‘anti-paper’ claims about digitized processes being more environmentally friendly as it removed the dependency on paper and plastic. However, are these claims actually true? Do digital processes actually have a lower environmental footprint than traditional business processes where e.g. documentation, promotion and marketing is done on physical materials such as paper?

For this question to be answered, there first needs to be clarity on how environmental footprint is defined. In this case, environmental footprint will be defined as the effect that an activity has on the environment, and this could be an effect in terms of CO2 emissions, amount of waste produced, recycle rate or else.

The claims that digital processes are more environmentally friendly than traditional processes seem very logic. On first sight, digital processes consume less physical materials than traditional processes; saving documentation in the cloud vs printing or writing the documentation on paper. However, in reality this is not the case. Obviously, paper or other physical materials such as plastic are in principle not environmentally friendly. In the case of paper, it uses wood as its main element, uses 400 – 2600 liters of water for the production of one kilo of paper and emits on average 500 grams of CO2 emissions per kilo of paper (which is the equivalent of eating two avocados). Altogether, the paper industry accounts for 7% of the global CO2 emissions. Compared to the airline industry, which is known as one of the most harmful industries, it is three times as much. Despite these numbers, it appears that the paper industry does not have a negative influence on the vegetation. On the contrary, it is proven that forest coverage has increased in both Europe and the US. Moreover, paper is recyclable up to seven times and approximately half of all paper is already being recycled globally, this reduces the amount of waste that paper leaves behind.

Digital processes on the other hand, do not seem to use a lot of materials on the surface. However, the devices used to document and process the business operations online require a lot of energy. Per organization, the CO2 emissions of energy usage can differ significantly dependent on whether the energy comes from a renewable source or fossil fuels. Moreover, the devices in the offices are not the only pieces of hardware that need energy with online documentation. Online data storage also requires enormous data centers that consume energy 24/7. Collectively, it is expected that the IT industry will account for 14% of total global CO2 emissions, whereas this is currently only 3%. Besides energy usage, technological devices require a lot of materials among which lithium, (precious) metals and rare commodities in the production phase. Despite the fact that concrete evidence and literature are not available yet on the environmental footprint of technological devices due to its relatively short existence, it is clear that technological devices require a lot of (non-recyclable) resources and that it is very likely that this has consequences for the environment.

In short, both traditional (paper-based) and digital processes have a significant environmental footprint on the planet. Due to the complexity of the total footprints and the lack of concrete evidence on technological devices, it is very hard to determine whether or not digital processes are actually less harmful to the environment than traditional processes. Therefore, organizations should be very careful with such statements and individuals should be critical and not blindly believe such statements as it can be used as a way of greenwashing.

References:
Cambridge Dictionary, n.d. Environmental footprint. Accessed on the 4th of October 2020 via https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/environmental-footprint
Kinsella, J. (2017). Digital Vs Paper: A History Of Printing, In House And Outsourced. Accessed on the 4th of October 2020 via https://www.ceotodaymagazine.com/2017/11/digital-vs-paper-a-history-of-printing-in-house-and-outsourced/
Klein Lankhorst, M. (2019). De papierindustrie stoot meer CO2 uit dan de luchtvaart. Is het nog wel verantwoord om papieren boeken uit te geven? Accessed on the 4th of October 2020 via https://decorrespondent.nl/9463/de-papierindustrie-stoot-meer-co2-uit-dan-de-luchtvaart-is-het-nog-wel-verantwoord-om-papieren-boeken-uit-te-geven/509327049-b14c9d5f
Moodie, A. (2014). Is digital really greener than paper? Accessed on the 4th of October 2020 via https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/digital-really-greener-paper-marketing
Project Drawdown, n.d. Recycled Paper. Accessed on the 4th of October 2020 via https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/recycled-paper
Simpel Duurzaam, (2020). Hoeveel is 1 kilo CO2? Accessed on the 4th of October 2020 via https://simpelduurzaam.nl/hoeveel-is-1-kilo-co2/
Two Sides, n.d. Electronic communication also has environmental impacts. Accessed on the 4th of October 2020 via https://www.twosides.info/electronic-communication/

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