Online Shopping – Is it More Environmentally Friendly?

As we all know, online shopping is much more convenient when you need to order books, cds, dvd’s or anything else – it also tends to be cheaper. But a lot of people think it is also a great deal more environmentally friendly than say, heading to a shopping mall. Sure, if you live next door to a bakers then it is not worth ordering cakes online but when it comes to a choice between driving to a shopping mall to get all your shopping, or ordering it online at stores like Coupon Croc or Amazon, which is the greener option?

Initially it would seem likely that online shopping is more eco-friendly. E-stores would take up less space and use less energy because all of the goods are stored in one place – the warehouse and you don’t need expensive lighting. However, once you start to factor in the packaging and the delivery trucks going out, things become more complicated.

However, help is at hand – a recent study by the Organization of Economic Cooperation & Development investigated precisely this debate and analysed the processes of both buying a book at a regular store and buying a book online. They worked out the shipping, the emissions, the retail space demands and all kinds of other issues. The results were quite surprising. Firstly, visiting the shopping malls was revealed to be a great deal more expensive – that was because the benefits gained by getting immediate satisfaction were massively outweighed by the cost of fuel to get there plus the cost of fuel for the shop when they needed to return unsold goods. Secondly, when it came to carbon footprints, the greatest damage was caused by the individual vehicles driving out to the shopping mall. Shopping online proved to be much better for the environment in this particular area because a lot of the delivery vehicles were moving over to hybrid and electric style vans.

In the end, online shopping was proven to be by far the most green way to get your shopping.