Environment and E-commerce

Besides the fact that shopping on-line is definitely much, much cheaper and a lot less stressful, it would be interesting to think about the environmental impact of e-commerce.
According to Industrial Technology Research Institute’s Jih Chang Yang, who conducted a study entitled Environmental Impact of E-Commerce and Other Sustainability Implications of the Information Economy, on the effects of e-commerce on the environment, “It is hard to imagine the environmental impact of e-commerce (since),\ after all it doesn’t emit any pollutants, or uses much energy and natural resources. It would also be hard to imagine it is connected to the now familiar topics of sustainability, such as climate change, and biodiversity and habitat loss.”
But Yang says the environmental impacts are there. In the next three to four years, the size of business-to-business e-commerce is expected to grow by up to 1,000 times to $12.5 trillion (from the current $1.3 trillion). “Looking further out, by 2010, it will likely grow to account for half of all commerce,” Yang says. “What is happening here is nothing short of mass migration of the world’s buying and selling from their existing physical and material based ‘universe’ to a virtual parallel universe.”
This shift, she adds, brings two inter-related changes. Firstly, since the buying and selling take place on-line, costs are bound to be reduced dynamically, which in turn, and secondly, will lower the prices. “(And) if buying and selling are becoming a lot faster and a lot cheaper because of e-commerce, then what’s going to happen to the underlying driving force of our sustainability problems- the demand and consumption of materials and natural resources?” queries Yang. “The answer is obvious.” As prices fall, demand and consumption will rise. This is elementary economics. And with accelerating consumption of natural resources, our sustainability just spirals downward that much faster.”
To deal with the issue, Yang recommends the need to “dematerialize,” meaning the “reduction of the consumption of materials, such as energy, water, land, forests, minerals, et cetera, in each unit of consumption.” “We need to accelerate dematerialization so that it catches up with growth,” Yang says. “Furthermore, once we (have dematerialized), we need to keep going at that kind of speed year after year. That’s our sustainability challenge.”
This may sound complex, but knowing what one is buying is already a good start towards greening e-commerce, since it can help turn “e-commerce become material-less, or at least very material-light.”
This awareness is influencing online shopping habits now, “with something as seemingly small as knowing where the items bought online are manufactured hopefully helping in preserving what they have left there,” he says.
This, in turn, is where the hope of greening e-commerce lies, says Yang. “The only force powerful enough to solve the problems created by creativity would be creativity itself. Men create. Men create problems. Men must solve these problems. It’s that simple, and that tough.”