Five Ways to Keep the Planet from Paying the Price for Our Holiday Shipping

We’re quickly approaching the last phase of the holiday shopping season: last minute panic. Our roadways, airways, and waterways have already been crowded year-round with packages, with FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Service averaging 162.6 billion boxes and letter deliveries annually.

So don’t get us wrong, we know that it’s not only a holiday thing. It’s a problem all year round, but when the USPS ships 15% of its total packages between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve, an increase in packages bearing two-day, one-day, or even same day labels makes a bad problem even worse. And it’s the planet that’s paying the price for all those expedited shipping options — in the form of CO₂ emissions.

Expedited shipping is a huge contributor to climate change, but we’re not asking you to stop shopping online entirely, cancel your Prime account, or borrow a one horse open sleigh to ship your holiday packages this year, we’re simply asking you to ship better year round — and especially so during the holiday season. The carbon cost associated with your shipping has already piled up this year, so why add to it?

Luckily, you can ship better with just a few simple actions — here’s how.

Ship Less Stuff

It’s basic math. If every package you mail generates carbon emissions of some kind, a simple solution for reducing the amount of carbon your shipping generates is to simply ship fewer items. If you’re going to be buying a lot of items, do whatever you can to consolidate your shipping. Don’t use 10 individual deliveries when getting everything put in one big box will do the job just fine.

It’s not just the deliveries either — help establish a no-return policy for carbon by taking some extra time to research items before you buy them, reducing the chances that you’ll need to return them. Focus your impulses on reducing your carbon footprint, not on impulse shopping.

Ship Stuff Longer

It’s not just how much you ship, it’s how long you ship it for. Deliveries that stretch over longer periods are much more efficient than those that put a premium on speed.

For example, a 2012 study showed that in theory, some online deliveries can actually cut between 80%-90% of the emissions that would have resulted from a person physically driving to a store — but that carbon savings goes out the window (and into the atmosphere) if deliveries over long distances are expedited.

Ship From Stores that Offset Their Delivery Costs

There are lots of great brands out there that do this, like our friends at Soleil Toujours, Thistle, Rebecca Taylor, Zero Carbon Coffee Company, DYPER, Coconut Bowls, and ADAY. If you’re shopping at smaller ecommerce sites but can’t see whether or not they provide shipping offsets, reach out and see if they utilize services like UPS’ carbon neutral shipping offering. Even larger marketplaces like Etsy have committed to 100% carbon neutral shipping, so it’s certainly a trend on the rise.

Sign up with Amazon Smile (CE)

And if the only place you do any kind of online shopping is Amazon, don’t worry — you can still ship better, even after you’ve unchecked that “Same Day Shipping” box. AmazonSmile is a website operated by Amazon.com with the same products, prices, and shopping features as the regular site. The only difference is that when you shop on AmazonSmile, they donate 0.5% of the purchase price of eligible products to the non-profit organization of your choice. And, not to brag, but we know a really good non-profit organization for you to choose. It’s not a 1-to-1 way to completely offset your shipping, but it’s a great start — and all you have to do is the shopping you were going to do anyway.

Offset the Rest

Even if you diligently follow every single simple action listed here, it’s still likely that your online deliveries are going to come bundled up with some extra carbon.

But even if you can’t reduce it all, you can do your best — then you can offset the rest.

And that’s the kind of climate action that will get you an expedited stamp of approval from the planet.