The Cyber Monday / Black Friday Smackdown: Measuring the Carbon Impact of Holiday Shopping
- Dec 20, 2009
- Buy Green
- Ashwin Seshagiri
At eBay, we've known for a while that buying used online is much better for the environment than driving to the mall or a big box store and getting something new off the shelf. Earlier in December, a couple of research firms released a study comparing the environmental impacts of Black Friday, which most people consider to be the biggest shopping day of the year, with Cyber Monday, a day that has become popular over the past few years to do holiday shopping online. Among other things, the study found that buying something on Black Friday, on average, was 50 times worse for the environment than buying something online on Cyber Monday.
Some critics have argued that this isn't completely true because of all the different factors involved. Did some walk or drive to the mall? If something was ordered online, was it sent by next day air, or was it shipped by ground delivery by the UPS or USPS? (ground shipping, for example, emits eight times less carbon dioxide into the air than air freight.) Basically the point is it's hard to make an exact, one-to-one relationship between buying online and buying in-store.
But that doesn't make the study any less meaningful necessarily. It shows not only how popular e-commerce is becoming, it highlights how significantly better it is for the environment, regardless of what the exact number is. Check out this article to find out more about the study. Or visit GigaOM Pro, the Silicon Valley reserach firm that originally published the study conducted by MindClick GSM.
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