Lucy Siegle: Online shopping still at mercy of freight footprint

Opinion

Shopping has become a cloak-and-dagger affair. Conspicuous consumption does not look good during a recession, which explains why so many of us are embracing e-commerce.

In Britain, online shopping is projected to grow from £8.9 billion to around £21.3 billion by the end of 2011.

Often people proclaim they've embraced e-commerce because it's "green".

This is understandable. If many shopping bags in a recession looks bad, bricks and mortar retail - huge out-of-town shopping centres, retail emporia that insist on leaving their doors open even in winter and grocery stores full of the most inefficient freezers - look terrible during an ecological emergency.

Should we buy the idea that e-commerce is any better? Several studies have tried to answer this with cold, hard data.

A 2000 study on Webvan, a now defunct US online grocer, concluded that a wider adoption of e-commerce would not give us environmental gains, while a 2002 study of US book retailing found no greater energy savings selling online.

But the study that all e-tailers are talking about is a new one from Carnegie Mellon University, which has found that shopping online via Buy.com's e-commerce model for electronic products uses 35 per cent less energy consumption and CO2 emissions than a traditional bricks-and-mortar model.

This is largely because it avoids the usual retail distribution model and, of course, the impact of consumers driving to a store (the average person drives 22km in total, to buy three items).

And, from the shopper's perspective, online buying often allows you to avoid the ephemera of retail, like the 100 million coat hangers that end up in landfill each year, or elongated till receipts. (Seek out shoeboxx.co.uk which allows you to organise all your receipts online, ultimately doing away with them.)

But both models are flawed, because online or on the high street, retailers are dependent on a hydrocarbon-fuelled delivery system.

Trucks deliver 4.8 million tonnes of freight each day in Britain, which works out at about 80kg per person.

To make matters worse, after a truck drops off the goods it often returns empty to the depot. A 2002 study of 20,000 haulage trips found that only 2.4 per cent of return journey legs found suitable backloads.

This journey represents a large part of the impact of what we buy.

Online shopping may prove marginally more green in terms of energy saving (often a strategy that favours homogenised, multinational retail), but we shouldn't forget progressive bricks-and-mortar retail.

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