Going Green #4.

The cost of shipping shit on the planet is one of the biggest overlooked green issues - I believe. So you use cloth bags, you recycle, you try to cut down on everything – but you still shop online and have individual items shipped to your house. Let’s map out the life of an item. I want a new top that is made in India. First there is the shipping of the materials from the fabric factory in China to the manufactures site. Then they are shipped from India to a distributor in America. Then they go from there to say an Amazon warehouse. After that – I order the silly shirt and it is boxed and shipped from New Jersey to my house in New Mexico. This is a flight ride or a truck ride across the country.

Let’s look at the numbers and assume that the item is traveling by plane most of the way. [A plane like a Boeing 747 uses approximately 1 gallon of fuel (about 4 liters) every second. Over the course of a 10-hour flight, it might burn 36,000 gallons (150,000 liters). According to Boeing's Web site, the 747 burns approximately 5 gallons of fuel per mile] If a standard plane gets 0.2 mpg and we look up flight distances for each of our trips we find: China – India (~2000 miles), India –USA (~8000 miles), New Jersey – New Mexico (~1700 miles).

How many gallons of fuel did we use to get that shirt to my back? 58500 gallons of gas!

Now of course you will say that there were other items on the flight. That it wasn’t just the one shirt. But, how many shirts would you need to make it worth the trip?

Of course there is the thought that driving around looking for the exact item you want can be more costly, in the way of gas, than just ordering online. I haven’t really seen anything that proves this though.

Ordering online might be easier - but is it better for the environment?


Avivah. Maybe a bit more research on both of our parts.
According to UPS and other mailing people they use a Boeing 747-400. It gets ~3378 g/hour (at a cruising speed of 576 mph). If in our case we are going 11700 miles it would take ~20 hours (with no take-offs and landings). Which would equal 67560 gallons of gas. Now jet fuel is more expensive than regular gas (~$3.50/gallon). So if we got 1000 shirts on that plane at that cost and gallons used it would be ~$236.46 in shipping cost alone.

Last bit is that there has been a shift from large ocean cargo to more airlines because of cost. Still are large percent of stuff is shipped by boat over seas ... but not all. And I was just trying to give a back of the envelope look at gas cost for items. Cargo ships are worse for the environment than planes when it comes to emissions - and I'm not even going to start taking that into consideration.