Home Shopping

E-Commerce

But if home shopping can be criticized as a symptom of globalization—goods, for example, that might be made in China can be imported to the United States, warehoused, and shipped on demand to customers, and then redistributed to other countries in the form of waste—it has also presented environmentalists with a conundrum. Does the centralized storage and distribution of e-commerce and home shopping reduce overall waste by saving on transportation costs and consolidating the energy involved in warehousing products, or are those savings lost when increased packaging or the hidden costs associated with e-waste are considered?

It is therefore worth making distinctions between the kinds of shopping available over the Internet, for each has a different local and environmental impact in terms of energy expended or wasted, as well as in their implications for post-consumer waste. One can broadly categorize the goods available to consumers in their homes as those offered by big corporations that distribute and market, but do not fabricate, a range of objects from different manufacturers. Perhaps the most famous example is http://Amazon.com, but in this category one can include those sites that retail objects from a range of producers, such as shoes, jewelry, housewares, and linens. The most famous of these is http://Overstock.com. Such retailers, large and small, are noteworthy because they often do not have their own retail stores; rather, they store goods in warehouses (or, in the case of http://etsy.com, in homes or workshops), and ship on demand. For such retailers, the costs of storage and shipping and packaging represent the waste produced by online shopping. The second sort of online retailer with which many patrons are familiar are those retailers that have retail outlets in addition to online sales. Such retailers include major box stores like Target or Walmart, which are consolidated in local geographic areas but will ship goods to local stores on demand for pickup by consumers. This list of corporate online retailers can include those corporations that sell or rent digital media directly to consumers in place of actual artifacts, for example, digital books that are downloaded directly to an e-reader or digital music and films downloaded directly to an mp3 player or smartphone.

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