We need to have a difficult conversation about online shopping and the environment

There is one really clear message, which is that buying something you are not sure about and returning it is an environmental disaster, writes Hamish McRae

This is business – and there is nothing wrong with that (Getty)

Should you be hitting the screen for day two of Amazon Prime Day, there’s plenty of stuff still to go. The newspapers are heaving in there, with The Independent running a live tally of the best discounts on offer. If you want to get 55 per cent off a Braun beard trimmer, you know where to go.

This is business – and there is nothing wrong with that. As we acknowledge, we may earn commission from the links, but we pick the items and the revenues help fund our journalism. And whatever you think of Amazon as a company, its service is stunningly swift and successful.

But what about the environment? We have all had the experience of a large cardboard box arriving at the door, which when you open it reveals a small item crouching in the corner surrounded by reams of brown paper packaging. As a result of the pandemic, UK online sales rose from 20 per cent of total retail sales in January 2020 to a peak of 36 per cent this January.

They have fallen back a little since then, as shops reopened, and were 27 per cent in May – but I would expect them to settle down around 30 per cent. That is a huge shift. It is as big as the move from the high street grocer to the supermarket, and it has happened much faster.

There have been a number of studies trying to estimate the environmental impact, and it’s unsurprisingly complicated. There is one really clear message, which is that buying something you are not sure about and returning it is an environmental disaster. If you try on a jacket in a store and decide not to buy it there is only the environmental cost of your journey to the store. If you have it delivered and then send it back you double the transport cost.

A British Council report recorded that in Germany up to one-third of online purchases were returned. In the US another study suggested that online apparel returns were around 25 per cent. Apparently many shoppers deliberately over-order and then return what they don’t want.

It gets worse. In the case of clothes, many that are sent back are dirty or damaged. Worse still, it may not be worthwhile sorting them from the good ones, with the result that the whole lot ends up being burnt or in landfill. Oh dear.

Returns apart, the environmental tally is more evenly balanced. A lot depends on the assumptions you make about people’s habits. If, for example, someone pops into a shop on the way home from work do you count the environmental impact of their transport costs? Surely not. On the other hand when people drive to a supermarket for a weekly shop, they are probably using more energy than a van driver dropping off deliveries for 50 families, even if each delivery is smaller and people have two or three drops a week.

Some researchers in Radboud University in the Netherlands looked last year at British data to see which out of three methods of grocery shopping – physically going to a supermarket, ordering online from the supermarket, or going to a full online retailer with an out-of-town warehouse – was best.

They concluded that the supermarket delivery service was best for carbon emissions, followed by shopping yourself, with full online the least efficient. The delivery service beat personal shopping because in Britain we usually drive to the supermarket, whereas a single supermarket van did a lot of drops. Online was worst because of the greater distances covered and the fact that people were sometimes away and not able to take delivery.

But that data was all pre-Covid – the report came out in February 2020. Things may have shifted as online volumes have risen. Amazon argues that online is more efficient. It commissioned a report from Oliver Wyman that looked at different countries in Europe, which concluded that offline shopping “results in between 1.5 and 2.9 times more greenhouse gas emissions than online shopping”.

“While e-commerce needs delivery vans to circulate, these reduce car traffic by between four and nine times the amount they generate. Land use for e-commerce is lower than for physical retail, when logistics, selling space, and related parking space are included.”

What tips the balance towards online is that the energy cost of running a supermarket is much higher than that needed by an out-of-town warehouse. Packaging and IT energy consumption is higher for online, as you might expect, but these are small items by comparison. Even if you don’t count the energy used by people when they travel to a shop – which of course you should – online would still be more efficient.

The debate will doubtless continue to rage. But one thing is absolutely clear. If you do order a lot of stuff from Amazon and care about the environment, make sure you only order what you really want – and try never to have to send it back.