E-commerce and CO2

The papers presented at the IEEE Symposium included this report which considers the growth of e-commerce and that alternative retail channels have some distinct differences with regard to environmental costs. The authors build on prior comparative research and conduct a streamlined Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to quantify variations in energy use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for the alternative systems using data received from the e-commerce industry for an electronic product. The results confirm prior findings that e-commerce delivery uses less primary energy and produces less CO2 emissions than traditional retailing.

Weber, C.L., et al. “Life Cycle Comparison of Traditional Retail and E-commerce Logistics for Electronic Products: A Case Study of Buy.com” can be downloaded here.