February 17, 2016
Could reducing cardboard packaging be bad for the environment?
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Don MacKenzie
The New York Times had a story yesterday about the large and growing amount of cardboard being used in packaging up goods for on-demand delivery. It gives a great introduction to some of the tough questions about online shopping and on-demand delivery and how to assess their net environmental impacts. It also mentions various efforts to reduce the amount of cardboard used in packaging for on-demand delivery. But what if these efforts are counterproductive?
As I show below, the energy and greenhouse gas emissions associated with a truck making a delivery are something like 7-10 times those due to the box it delivers (details below…). The box isn’t peanuts, but it’s not where most of the impact is coming from. Yet the cardboard packaging seems to be what consumers notice. The story opens with this theme (emphasis added):
Ruchit Garg, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, says that he worries that something isn’t right with his Internet shopping habit. With each new delivery to his doorstep — sometimes several in a day — he faces the source of his guilt and frustration: another cardboard box.
Then, when he opens the shipment, he is often confronted with a Russian nesting doll’s worth of boxes inside boxes to protect his electronics, deodorant, clothing or groceries.
And later returns to it, with another customer who is a heavy user of on-demand delivery:
She thinks more about the cardboard that comes into her house than the truck emissions, she said. “It’s embarrassing,” she added of her mass of weekly recycling.
What if the visibility of the cardboard acts as a reminder to consumers of their environmental impacts? Would removing that reminder stimulate more demand for delivery, outweighing the energy and emissions benefits of using less packaging? It’s at least worth considering, since even a 10-15% increase in the number of deliveries could outweigh the savings from eliminating the cardboard packaging.
Details…
How important are the energy and GHG emissions impacts of the cardboard, relative to those of the vehicles making the deliveries?
A 6″ x 8″ x 2″ cardboard box, which strikes me as typical for a small Amazon delivery, probably weighs about 90 grams. According to a lifecycle analysis commissioned by the Corrugated Packaging Alliance, 1 kg of corrugated product has a lifecycle primary energy demand of 21.3 MJ and emits 1.01 kg CO2-eq in greenhouse gases. So, the lifecycle impacts of our small box are on the order of 1.9 MJ of primary energy and 0.09 kg CO2-eq.
Now, how about the vehicle emissions from delivery? Let’s start by assuming that the deliveries are made by one of UPS’s ubiquitous vans, which get about 10 miles per gallon. A quick analysis of driving distances and number of stops by UPS drivers suggests an average of about 0.9 miles of driving per stop. Assuming a lifecycle emissions rate of 11 kg CO2-eq per gallon of fuel, an energy content of 120 MJ/gallon, and 80% efficiency in extracting, refining, and distributing the fuel, we can estimate that the impacts of the vehicle fuel used to make one delivery:
Primary Energy = 0.9 miles / (10 mi/gal) * (120 MJ / gallon) / 80% = 13.5 MJ
GHGs = 0.9 miles / (10 mi/gal) * (11 kg CO2-eq / gallon) = 0.99 kg CO2-eq
Note: it’s possible that these on-demand deliveries are not being made by large trucks on optimized routes. As the Times article notes, “Instead of taking big truckloads to single retailers they now make more scattershot deliveries.” If we therefore assume that our package is delivered in a hybrid car getting 50 mpg, on a 5 mile round trip, our numbers will come out about the same.
Larger boxes, or more boxes delivered per stop, or shorter distances between stops, will all tend to increase the importance of the boxes relative to the delivery vehicle’s fuel.
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