Is it better for the environment to shop online or in-store? – NorthJersey.com

Which form of shopping costs the planet more – online or in a brick-and-mortar store?

The answer isn’t black or white, and both methods have shades of green.

This week, North Jersey and the rest of the country gear up for the peak holiday shopping season, both in-store and online. From now until the end of December, online deliveries are expected to top 2 billion packages, and more than 164 million people are expected to visit malls or shop online during the Thanksgiving-Black Friday weekend.

In the early days of online shopping, environmentalists and analysts argued that long-haul deliveries by gas guzzling trucks to bring a single package to a person’s house gave the online option alarger carbon footprint than stores and malls, where a single truck delivery could serve hundreds of shoppers.

But as online shopping has grown and evolved, the green line has shifted.

As a result, evenenvironmental activists who work together opt for differing “green” shopping strategies. 

At the offices of the Hackensack Riverkeeper, an organization dedicated to protecting the North Jersey watershed, Riverkeeper Bill Sheehan prefers to shop in stores, while office manager Lisa Vandenberg is a fan of online shopping.

So which approach is better for the planet? Either, according to experts who study the impact of shopping.

Sheehan wins green points for knowing what he wants to buy before heading to the store, and for trying on clothes before buying to avoid wasteful return trips.

Vandenberg gets a green star for seeking out online retailers with reusable or minimal packaging, and for making a sustainable fashion choice by using online retailer Rent the Runway for “recycled” special occasion dresses.

Rent the Runway, which rents clothes, avoiding the waste of buying a dress or outfit someone will wear only once, sends clothes in reusable, returnable bags. “When you’re done with the dress you put it back in the garment bag, you zip it up, you put the little lock on it, and you send it to them,” Vandenberg said.

“I thought that was great,” she said. “I thought ‘OK, they’re environmentally conscious. I’m going to use them.'”

Vandenberg even used Rent the Runway for a dress she wore to the Hackensack Riverkeeper’s annual gala dinner last month.

Online retailers and shopping center owners cite competing reports showing their shopping method is greener.

In 2016, a study conducted by Deloitte Consulting, in partnership with Simon Property Group, one of the largest owners of shopping centers in this country, concluded that mall shopping had 7 percent less environmental impact, as measured by carbon emissions, than online shopping.

An earlier study by Carnegie Mellon’s Green Design Institute found that e-commerce reduced a shopper’s carbon footprint by 35 percent, by replacing individual car trips to stores with centralized shipping.

E-commerce gets greener

Jerry Storch, chief executive of Storch Advisors, a retail consulting firm, was involved in the debate over online versus in-store shopping as an executive at some of America’s largest retailers, including Target, Toys R Us, Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue. He’s seen the environmental impact equation shift from the early years of e-commerce, when in-store shopping was consideredgreener.

Now, Storch said, “the gap is closing.” Online home delivery, he said, “is still an environmental question mark” because of the extra carbon footprint needed for doorstep home delivery, and the additional packaging involved. But e-commerce has grown well beyond home delivery, to include in-store pickup, central delivery lockers, and other options that are more energy efficient.

The gap is also narrowing, Storch said, because as more people buy online, “the density of delivery routes is increasing.” In the past a delivery truck might have to make a trip to deliver one package to a single home. Now, when everyone on the block is getting packages, deliveries can be grouped.

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In addition, an increasing number of online retailers use the U.S. postal service for the final leg in the delivery journey, said Krista Fabregas, an e-commerce and retail analyst for FitSmallBusiness.com.

“They’ve already got capacity going to neighborhoods every single day with half-filled trucks,” Fabregas said. “They’re stopping at your mailbox anyway.”

She estimates that 75 percent of online packages are being delivered by trucks that have open capacity rather than by additional vehicles making single deliveries.

Online retailers like Amazon have proposed replacing their delivery trucks with electric vehicles, a move that would make online shipping a lot greener, said Rick Rizzuto, northeast regional vice president for Transwestern, a real estate development firm.

Packaging, however, remains the biggest strike against online shopping.

“You do see strong attempts by e-commerce companies to use greener packaging,” Storch said. “But there’s almost no way to get around the fact that you’re taking something that is already packaged for consumer sale and putting it in an additional package in order to deliver it,” he said.

Consumer behavior plays a role

Just as online retailers are becoming greener by grouping deliveries, store shopping is greener when people combine a shopping trip with other activities at the same mall, such as dining or going to a movie.

“Some make the argument that the consumer gets in their car and drives to the store and picks up one item and drives home, and that leaves a bigger carbon footprint than a delivery vehicle,” Storch said. “The only problem with that is consumers don’t behave that way.”

They consolidate shopping errands with picking up a child from school. They also go to the mall to socialize, and to be entertained, or to dine, Storch said. “To say that it’s just to buy something misses the whole point of why people, as social animals, don’t just stay home all day.”

The question of which shopping method is greener can trigger an hours-long discussion in Jill Lipoti’s classes at Rutgers University. Lipoti, a human ecologyprofessor and a former New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection official, teaches courses required for the university’s minor in sustainability, the fastest growing minor in the School of Environment and Biological Sciences.

The environmental impact of shopping resonates with her students, but that the discussion is more complicated than whether online orin-store shopping is better.

In a recent classroom discussion, students looked at questions like “How many stores do you visit before you buy?” and “Is comparing prices online better than driving from store to store?” But they quickly branched into questions about where and how items are made, what resources and labor are used in the manufacturing, how long a product will last, and how is it packaged.

“So the issue of sustainability became one that is not just focused on what are the transportation miles to get your commodity to your house, but how much water is used in growing cotton, or raising sheep, or in manufacturing, or in dying the fabric,” Lipoti said.

The students discussed how buying items like refrigerators might be better to do online, but in-store shopping for clothing articles like shoes, might be greener.

But even the shoes example raised other questions, Lipoti said – the issue of returns. Zappos, the online shoe retailer, tells customers to buy shoes in multiple sizes, see which fits best when they show up at your doorstep, and then return the other pair. “But then you’re doubling your greenhouse gases for the shoes,” she said. 

Shopping in stores and malls for shoes, however, has its own thorny issues. “How many stores do you visit before you see these are the shoes for me?” Lipoti said.

“It isn’t online versus mall versus Main Street, it is how you approach it, and thinking about what you do” ahead of time, she said.

She tries to get her students to think about sustainability with everything they do, “from the time they get up and eat breakfast to whether they take the bus or take a bicycle or drive a car.” 

A growing interest in sustainability is driving downtown redevelopments that bring housing, retail and office space together in places that more people can reach by mass transit, “which is obviously good for the environment,” said Matt Dolly, director of research at Transwestern.

Malls also are becoming places where people do a lot of other activities along with shopping, Rizzuto said, which boosts their green score.

“But I also see a lot of people going to malls just to window shop and still ordering products online,” Rizzuto said. That strikes him has “having almost a double impact” on the environment, resulting in a carbon footprint for the mall trip and the online deliveries.

What you buy and how you buy it

In the online versus store shopping debate, what and how you buy is becoming more of an environmental factor than whether you buy it online or in-store. Making multiple trips to a mall by yourself and buying a single item each time is not green, experts say. Going to the mall in a group, doing all your shopping in a single day, and combining the trip with activities like entertainment and dining is greener.

Making separate online orders every day, and choosing same day or two-day delivery, rather than grouping orders into a single delivery that takes longer to arrive is not green.

Making lots of returns, both online and in stores, greatly increases your shopping carbon footprint. The Deloitte-Simon study found that 33 percent of online purchases are returned, compared to 7 percent of store purchases.

Doug O’Malley, director of Environment New Jersey, said the most environmentally friendly option is to walk or take a three-minute drive to your local downtown and then walk from store to store doing your holiday shopping.

The items being sold in the store, O’Malley acknowledged, still might have been shipped from China, but by shopping downtown you are supporting local businesses that pay taxes, and not generating the carbon emissions created by cars in a crowded mall parking lot, or by a delivery truck.

Buying things you don’t need or will never use creates the greatest negative impact for the planet.

Sheehan, the Hackensack Riverkeeper, says that is one of the arguments against online shopping. “When you’re online and you’re using the credit card, you’ll spend more money than you would if you had to actually think about what your resources are,” he said. “I’ve known people who’ve really run up their credit cards because they couldn’t stay off the computer.”

O’Malley agreed.The convenience of online shopping encourages Americans to buy more than they need, he said. “What is the carbon impact of buying more stuff, now that you can buy that popcorn maker at midnight and you don’t have to go to the mall to get it?” 

“Everything we buy has an environmental impact,” he said.

One hope of environmentalists is that e-commerce growth will lead to more sharing of products, like Lisa Vanderberg’s Rent the Runway experience.

“We could use a Rent the Runway approach for nearly everything we use,” O’Malley said.

In fact, close to 150 students showed up for an evening event at Rutgers to promote sustainability, and proposed 19 projects to make their campus more sustainable, including one of the greenest forms of shopping – a clothing swap.

“They liked the idea that instead of throwing clothing away they swapped them with somebody who would use it,” Lipoti said. “And they liked getting new clothes without spending money.”

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