What happens to your parcels ordered on the internet when you decide to return them? Thanks to product returns, a service that has allowed e-commerce sales to skyrocket, it’s easy… and most often free. The major brands have made this ease of return a commercial argument. However, this service has an ecological cost. When you drop off the package at the bottom of your house, you do not suspect the thousands of kilometers it will travel. What will be the carbon footprint of his journey?
The “Special Envoy” journalists ordered several products on the internet, then concealed GPS trackers in the packaging of the items they returned. Thus, they were able to follow their journey in real time. Example with a tool kit ordered on the Amazon site: the return label bears an address in Orléans. However, the destination that will be read by the sorting machine on the barcode is quite different…
A processing center in Slovakia when the return label bears an address in Orleans
Thanks to the tracer which indicates its position, one can follow the package in a journey of three days. It crosses France from west to east, then Germany and the Czech Republic to finally arrive… in Slovakia, in Sered. Amazon has set up its processing center there for products returned by European customers. More than 1,500 kilometers were traveled by truck by our tool kit… which, bought by a new client, subsequently flew to London.
To find out the carbon footprint of this journey, “Special Envoy” contacted a French start-up, Greenly. One of its founders, Alexis Normand, calculated the greenhouse gas emissions generated for the magazine. The tool kit truck trip emitted 500 grams of C02, and 3 kilos more if the plane trip is added. Knowing that 17 million French items are returned each year, we are beginning to measure the impact of this practice on the environment…
As much CO2 emitted in one year as 2,125 flights around the Earth
For Alexis Normand, these are “massive behavior” induced by the encouragement of prompt return and dispatch which are problematic. Indeed, by transporting all the items of its French customers to Slovakia, Amazon emits tons of CO2. As much, in one year, as an airplane that would circle the Earth 2,125 times, according to Greenly’s estimates.
Alexis Normand also points to the lack of transparency of Amazon and most of its competitors: when “you do a return, you don’t know if your toolbox, it goes 50 kilometers or 3,000 kilometers; so as a consumer you don’t have enough information to align your behavior and your values” .
Lots of miles, lots of CO2… as Amazon pledges to “offer a sustainable approach to its customers” and “reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2040”. The e-commerce giant promises that we will soon see its new electric delivery vans on the streets. In the meantime, most of the returned products make the trip by truck to Sered…
Excerpt from “Very dear parcels!”, a report to review in “Correspondent” May 5, 2002.
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