I am back in the swing of things after the wedding and am now writing the first Red Shirt blog posting as married man! To say our wedding day was perfect was an understatement. It just all came together. Then again, it could have been down pouring rain, but it still would have been perfect somehow. (And no, that is not our son Becca is holding, that is our nephew.)
We returned home from a mini-honeymoon in Eastport, ME and were greeted with a pile of gifts. We didn’t really register for a lot of stuff. Since we are both in our 30s we already had plenty of it, including some family heirlooms, hand-me downs from former roommates, and acquisitions we’ve made ourselves. In fact, being the treehuggers that we are, we encouraged re-gifting and experiential gifts.
Nevertheless, we did have items on registries at Amazon, Target, and William Sonoma (the first two will donate a percentage of sales to one of our favorite charities). Since our return, gifts or cards have arrived almost daily. I have been putting more than our fair share of cardboard out on recycling day. Even though we are recycling (or holding for later reuse) all the packaging material, I still have been feeling bad about all the excess packaging that comes with physical gifts.
The other day, we received a couple more packages. One item came in a decent sized box but was very light. I was curious what was inside, so I opened it immediately and was surprised to find one rather small item, a grill cleaning brush.
I was not surprised that we received the brush. We had registered for it (and it went along with a grill that we had already received). Yet, I was surprised that such a small item was shipped in such a large box. Let’s do a little math:
- If you measure the brush at its widest points for length, width, and height, the total volume is 90 cubic inches (18” x 2.5” X 2”).
- It was shipped in a box designed to hold over 1,437 cubic inches (18.25” x 9” x 8.75”).
- Our new grill cleaning brush used up about 6% of the box’s volume. But instead of Amazon filling the rest of the space with 15 more brushes, they shipped us something else: 1,347 cubic inches of air (contained in plastic bubbles).
Someone might argue that it is not that big of a deal since air does not weigh anything. It likely does not cause any extra emissions — no extra weight is shipped. I would partially agree with that argument. But here is the real issue.
The empty space in the box took up unnecessary space in the shipping vehicle (most likely a truck). This space could have been filled by several other packages, but instead those packages had to go on another truck. All the empty space adds up to more trucks on the road. To understand how big this impact could be, I am going to do a little more (albeit rough) math:
- In 2009, Amazon sold over $24.5 billion of merchandise
- If we assume the average order size is $200, they received 122.5 million orders in 2009
- If we assume 25% of the orders were digital/downloadable goods (music, ebooks, software, etc.), Amazon shipped almost 91.9 million packages (75% of 122.5 million).
- Assuming only 5% of their shipments are wastefully packaged like mine, Amazon shipped almost 6.2 billion cubic inches of air in 2009 (91.9 million packages x 5% x 1,347 cubic inches of wasted space). This 6.2 billion cubic inches is equal to 3.5 million cubic feet.
- To transport this 3.5 million cubic feet of air required 894 trucks with 53’ trailers (each can hold 4,005 cubic feet)
- Assuming each truck was driven only one day and covered 400 miles (truckers can only drive 11 hours per day), this required over 2.5 million gallons of gas (assuming 7 mpg, average for tractor trailers is 5 to 9).
So what might appear to be just some extra space in a package could actually be 2.5 million gallons of wasted petroleum. And don’t get me started on the trees cut down for the unnecessarily large boxes…
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