Happy Amazon Prime Day!
Although it’s a little crazy that we in recent times have created a whole (pretty legitimate) annual celebration around online shopping frenzy, it’s interesting to recognize just how impactful trends like this are on our everyday lives. Environmentalism is interdisciplinary. Issues that affect our planet inherently affect all of us— scientists, teachers, artists, historians, politicians, economists. . . the list goes on, and with good reason. If we don’t consider all expertise and perspectives while trying to solve environmental problems, we won’t be able to find truly viable solutions.
So how does socioeconomic culture like Prime Day play into what’s happening to our earth? This week’s article explores the paradox of rapid online shipping.
You may have thought this way before, and most people do: online shopping minimizes the number of vehicles on the street, and that’s good for the environment. And that’s absolutely correct! However, those benefits often give a false sense of security, and can easily be balanced out by the detriments of needless orders. Let’s face it: scrolling through the internet makes it a lot easier to find and buy products than driving to and walking through a store. Maybe a little too much easier. The convenience of online shopping and delivery indisputably result in increased luxury production, packaging demand, and material use. Does cutting out the extra car on the road outweigh the amount of money, materials, and manpower required for those shipments to come to your door?
Well, that’s debatable. However, it has become even more debatable with recent changes to online shopping policies. With Amazon now offering one-day shipping to its members and its competitors imitating, the dilemma becomes a little more one-sided. Those benefits of delivery consolidation that used to hold ground in the ‘environmental-efficiency argument’ are slowly dwindling. The pace increases with one day shipping, and now so do the vehicles; except they’re not the sedans and SUVs that you would be using for your trips to the store, but the familiar delivery trucks and vans.
Don’t misunderstand us: consolidated shipping has proved to cause 80-90% less carbon emissions. Minimizing our car use has and will always be a great way to individually preserve environmental resources and protection. However, with rapid changes constantly advancing the industry of online shopping, it’s crucial to question whether the same benefits we saw years ago are still resulting in the same impact today.
DePillis, S. B. (2019, July 15). America's addiction to absurdly fast shipping has a hidden cost. | https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/15/business/fast-shipping-environmental-impact/index.html