Hacker News Reader

Comment by bighitbiker3 | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested to know this as well. However I'm more interested to know the overall environmental impact of buying some from Amazon in their current state.

At what distance is it overall more environmentally friendly for me to purchase from Amazon vs. taking my car and grabbing that item myself. I think I'd be surprised at how little that number is.

View on HN

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/environmen...

it's not a direct answer, but it seems like the answer is that it's essentially never more environmentally friendly to order online, because the odds that it actually eliminates a trip in your car are so tiny.

I imagine I'm atypical, but if I had to drive somewhere to pick up my online orders, my monthly car trips would go up between one and two orders of magnitude. But I do order a decent quantity of things on Amazon (for non-urgent things I use the "Amazon day" delivery option to help reduce their trips), and generally dislike driving and try to drive as little as possible (1-3 trips per week; pre-covid I could go weeks without driving).

I'd be curious to know what the environmental numbers are for someone like me.

You are not accounting for behavior change. Before the online ordering era, most people never went non-grocery shopping more than once a month. And did all that shopping in one big trip.

Once you think decide that all highly environmentally-destructive actions are not even an option on the table, your behavior changes.

That's a good point. Non-grocery items were a special trip, were rare, and usually involved months worth of purchases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com