(Photo Credit: Rupixen, Unsplash)Greenhouse gas emissions for large e-commerce retailers in the United States are 17% lower than brick-and-mortar retail, according to a new report published this week by the firm Generation Investment Management, making them more carbon efficient.
“The Carbon Footprint of Retail: E-Commerce versus Brick and Mortar” used a modeling tool developed for the firm that used detailed assumptions about energy consumption and GHG emissions in the supply chain to compare the footprint of an item sold by e-commerce retailers with one sold through a traditional retail store.
Generation Investment Management looked at emissions per item across four areas:
“The assumptions are based on estimates of real-world performance for major traditional retailers, such as Target and Walmart, as well as large e-commerce companies, which, given its prominence, are particularly based on Amazon,” the report said. “In our model, e-commerce achieves this advantage through the efficiencies achieved at global scale. In fact, when we model a smaller scale e-commerce company, it comes out slightly more emissions-intensive than our base case for brick-and-mortar — due in large part to less efficient last mile delivery.”
Generation Investment Management noted that e-commerce companies are well placed to unlock accurate environmental footprint accounting.
“We’d like to see companies do much more to highlight the emissions, water, and land footprint of individual products,” the firm said. “We’d also like them to promote circular materials and products over single use or short-lived items.”
