Transport,
packaging, other factors add environmental costs
University of Delaware
Logic suggests that online shopping is "greener" than traditional shopping. After all, when people shop from home, they are not jumping into their cars, one by one, to travel to the mall or the big box store.
But a multi-year regional study at the University of Delaware
suggests that home shopping has a greater impact on the transportation sector
than the public might suspect.
The results of the research are documented in a
paper, "Impacts of Home Shopping on Vehicle Operations and Greenhouse Gas
Emissions," in the International Journal of Sustainable
Development and World Ecology.
The study, which focused on the city of Newark, Delaware, was led by Arde Faghri, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of the Delaware Center for Transportation (DCT).
The project included data collection through a survey to
identify shopping behavior and summary of the survey results by product
category, followed by simulation and analysis.
"Our simulation results showed that home shopping puts an
additional burden on the local transportation network, as identified through
four measures of effectiveness -- travel time, delay, average speed, and
greenhouse gas emissions," says co-author Mingxin Li, a researcher at DCT.
While it's true that e-stores require less space and use less
energy, Faghri points out that online shopping puts more delivery trucks on the
roads, which translates into more wear-and-tear on pavements and increased
environmental pollution through the emission of fine particulate matter from
diesel engines.
An additional problem is that residential and downtown streets
were not designed to accommodate frequent truck stops, parking, loading and
unloading, so trucks can interfere with through traffic, causing delays and
compromising safety.
But what may be the most surprising finding of the study has
nothing to do with increased truck traffic.
"We found that the total number of vehicles miles traveled
hasn't decreased at all with the growth of online shopping," Faghri says.
"This suggests that people are using the time they save by shopping on the
internet to do other things like eating out at restaurants, going to the
movies, or visiting friends."
Faghri cautions that his study looked only at residential
commerce, not purchases made by commercial and industrial businesses, and that
the data his team collected was limited to a very small geographic area.
However, he emphasizes that local, state, regional, and national
planners need to keep a close eye on the impacts of the home shopping trend
when planning and budgeting for infrastructure needs.
"The increase in online shopping also affects land use
patterns such as the number and size of stores in large shopping malls with
vast parking spaces, as well as changes in labor markets, with, for example,
less demand for sales personnel and more for truck drivers," he says.
