Delivering online shopping to people’s homes is a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly when deliveries fail and the journey needs to be repeated.
Researchers are now re-thinking home deliveries to see if there is a better way of doing things, with ideas including robot couriers, jointly owned parcel lockers and an ‘Uber’ for parcels.
The problem begins with people like you. Let’s say you need a new shirt for work. You find one online and order it for delivery the next day. Your shirt will have probably have travelled by ship along with thousands of tonnes of other goods and then been carried by truck with many other articles of clothing to a warehouse. At some point, though, your shirt will have to be packaged up and carried directly to you.
It’s this last section of the logistics, known as the ‘last mile’, that is so troublesome. Here the packages’ routes split like the branches of a tree and make their way to many individual front doors, usually carried by a vast fleet of vans.
Online shopping still accounts for a fraction of all retail spending; below 20% in many developed countries. But it’s rising fast. In 2009, 36% of people in the EU had bought something online in the past 12 months, but by 2019 that had risen to 63%.
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