Shop Online, Save the Planet
I do a lot of shopping online. It is by far my preferred means of buying things we don't get on our regular grocery trips to Costco and Supertarget. For a while now, I have been concerned that it was more energy intensive to have UPS trucks driving individual products up to our door. I decided to check it out this afternoon, and it turns out, it uses 35% less energy to buy it online than it does to buy it at a store. Here is the report from Carnegie Mellon:
Full article: Shopping Online More Energy Efficient, Say Carnegie Mellon Researchers
A new study out of Carnegie Mellon University finds that shopping online instead of going to a retail store cuts CO2 emissions. The research, performed by the university's Green Design Institute, found that shopping online via comparison shopping site Buy.com uses 35 percent less energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions than what is produced in the traditional retail shopping model....
The three largest contributors to energy consumption and CO2 emissions include customer transport for traditional retail, packaging, and last mile delivery to customer homes for e-commerce. Approximately 65 percent of total emissions generated by the traditional retail model stemmed from the customer getting to and from the retail store. For e-commerce, packaging and last mile delivery were responsible for approximately 22 percent and 32 percent of the ecommerce energy usage, respectively.
Full article: Shopping Online More Energy Efficient, Say Carnegie Mellon Researchers
