Prime Day: The Environmental Cost
Today marks the start of Amazon Prime Day – a two-day sales event that sees the online retailing giant offer cut prices and “unlimited, fast delivery” on products that Prime members buy during the event.
Of course, Prime Day is just a thinly-veiled way for Amazon to boost sales during a traditional mid-year dip while it waits for Black Friday and Christmas. In 2020 alone, Amazon sold $10.4 billion worth of goods on Prime Day, up 45.2% on the previous year.
Yet while many publications are already promoting lists of the ‘best deals’ on offer during this year’s Prime Day, we investigate the ecological and climate consequences of this excessive sales event, and show why this is the year you should consider boycotting Prime Day.
Delivery Emissions
During the Prime Day event, members get ‘priority’ delivery on their purchases, which guarantees that the goods will be distributed to you within two days of placing an order.
The high-speed nature of these deliveries is where Prime Day has its most harmful environmental impact, as it floods the logistics industry with orders which have to be delivered in the fastest possible way, rather than the most considered way with the lowest emissions and most efficient routes.
Anne Goodchild, a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington, warned of this issue in a 2019 interview with The Goods: “As we move towards faster delivery, it gets harder to consolidate. When we’re not paying some sort of personal cost for the trip, I think it’s easy to overlook how much travel we’re adding.”
Goodchild’s warning is echoed by Partrick Brown, Director of Global Sustainability at UPS, in an interview with CNN: “The time in transit has a direct relationship to the environmental impact. I don’t think the average consumer understands the environmental impact of having something tomorrow versus two days from now. The more time you give me, the more efficient I can be.”
How delivery vehicles, emissions and congestion will increase due to online shopping. Credit: World Economic Forum
This is backed up by a 2017 disclosure by UPS which demonstrated that the boom in e-commerce had decreased the number of packages it dropped off per mile, leading to more trucks on the road and higher greenhouse gas emissions.
This is worsened by the types of vehicles used to make these deliveries, with the vast majority of these trucks being run on diesel, which produces four times more nitrogen dioxide pollution and 22 times more particulates than petrol.
Don’t forget that nitrogen dioxide has a greenhouse effect that is 298 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over 20 years, and can last in our atmosphere for over a century. See our Guide to Greenhouse Gases for more detail.
“The boom in e-commerce has decreased the number of packages dropped off per mile, leading to more trucks on the road, and higher greenhouse gas emissions”
Then, of course, we must consider how Amazon delivers the goods to countries in the first place – with Amazon using air shipping to ensure that it has enough products available in time for its major sales events. This produces more harmful emissions than any other form of transport.
“In general, if something is coming from a longer distance, it will absolutely be air shipped,” said Don MacKenzie, who leads the Sustainable Transportation Lab at the University of Washington, in an interview with Buzzfeed.
Promoting Consumption
“There is more demand created by the availability of these cheap products and cheap delivery options,” Miguel Jaller, a UC Davis Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering told Buzzfeed News.
This in itself is one of the biggest issues with Prime Day: consumption.
Those of us in developed nations account for a disproportionately high amount of CO2 compared to the rest of the world. In fact, the average Irish person has a carbon footprint nearly three times greater than the average on Earth. Credit: Oxfam
The vast majority of products sold during Prime Day 2020 were plastic-based and/or electronic items. Of course, anything made of plastic is really made of oil, and any additional electronic item that we add to our homes also increases our energy consumption, and therefore increases our carbon footprint.
The ethos for averting the worst outcomes of the Climate Crisis is to do more with less.
Of course, one of the common jokes about Amazon Prime Day is that you forgot what you ordered and ended up with something ridiculous that you never knew you needed before. While some may keep these products, the number of returns – which are free to Prime members – also spikes around events like Prime Day. This creates even more fuel miles and emissions, as well as creating a large amount of plastic, foam and cardboard waste from returned packaging.
In fact, whether items are returned or not, there has been a vast increase in the amount of cardboard waste created by events like Prime Day – with one waste management company in the US reporting a 20% increase in cardboard waste over the past decade.
While this can be recycled, we must remember than recycling still requires vast amounts of energy – it is better not to consume so much in the first place. And in 2017, while domestic consumption of cardboard rose 3.5% in the US, 300,000 fewer tons of cardboard were actually recycled than in previous years.
This is a worrying trend which is echoed in Ireland, with recycling rates falling from 74% in 2021 to just 64% in 2018, according to an EPA report in 2020.
On top of this, a 2021 investigation by ITV News found that Amazon is destroying millions of items of new and unused stock every year, with a former employee detailing that they were set targets to destroy 130,000 items per week - 50% of which were still unopened and in their original packaging.
Think of the Workers
Alongside the environmental cost of Prime Day, we must also consider the human impact of the event.
A 2019 investigation by Buzzfeed News found that contracted drivers were forced to work under gruelling conditions to meet their delivery targets, with many highlighting that they were forced to skip meals, urinate in bottles, and drive recklessly or over the speed limit in order to deliver more packages in less time.
As the largest online retailer, Amazon is shaping the industry’s norms and establishing the basic expectations that consumers should have for purchasing goods online – as seen by the number of other retailers who are now offering free next day delivery, free overnight shipping if an order is placed before midnight, or who are now creating their own made-up corporate sales events.
Through Prime Day, Amazon has dictated that our financial gains should come at vast ecological and environmental cost, with the lowest paid members of society baring the physical toll for our convenience.
The great irony of course is that, while people believe they are saving money on products now, they are increasing the amount of tax they will need to pay to fight the Climate Crisis with every year of inaction that passes.
Our actions and choices have the ability to make the world a more equitable and sustainable place. We would encourage our readers to consider boycotting this and future Prime Days, and other corporate sales events – or if you do indulge in them, to consider the consequences and alternatives available to you.
The average temperature in Ireland is increasing because of the Climate Crisis. Around the world this will kill millions and displace billions more people. Credit: Prof Ed Hawkins
Is a €91 iPad stand that also doubles as a toilet roll holder really worth the destruction of the only liveable planet in our solar system?
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