Today, a tip from our reader Marc-André Gingras, from Quebec, under the magnifying glass of François Saunier, senior analyst and deputy executive director of CIRAIG.
The thing of Marx-Olivier Gingras
Marc-Olivier Gingras of Quebec City favors the second-hand market, but when buying new items he prefers local businesses to multinationals. “We must stop buying on Amazon, in Costco, in Walmart,” he said.
François Saunier’s comments
Our reader has the right instinct by opting for the second-hand market. “This is often one of the most effective actions, because it allows the lifespan of many products to be extended and the production of an equivalent new item to be avoided”, explains François Saunier.
For new items, now, Mr. Saunier explains that, in the life cycle of a product, the stage of in-store purchase is often negligible in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. “More than the person or the company that owns the store, it is above all the product itself that should be better chosen to reduce its carbon footprint,” he says. We therefore consider the life of the product upstream and downstream of the purchase: the production of the raw materials that compose it, its manufacture, its transport to the trade, then its use and its end of life.
Finally, the $ 100 question: is it better to buy the same product in store or order it online? These two options each have their advantages and disadvantages, centered around three main parameters: transport, packaging and infrastructure.
“For transport, buying online allows more optimized delivery than if the buyer comes to the store,” says François Saunier. But it induces return rates which can be significant depending on the product, generating additional transport, and the choice of accelerated delivery can lead to air transport or less optimal delivery routes. “In terms of packaging, buying in-store obviously generates less. And for infrastructures, the advantage is in online shopping: the carbon footprint of the necessary digital infrastructures (website, computer, etc.) is less than that of the physical infrastructures of the store (energy for operation, etc. .), says Saunier.
“It is mainly the behavior of the buyer that will determine which purchase has a lower carbon footprint,” he says. Favoring group purchases (several purchases for the same trip or the same online order), limiting returns and opting for modes of transport with a low footprint are all parameters on which the buyer can play to reduce his footprint. ”