I've been reading George Monbiot's new book, Heat: how to stop the planet
burning. It's an excellent book, and I urge you all to read it. He
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10) When it comes to supermarkets and unnecessary packaging, I think that home delivery makes things worse. When I go to the supermarket (on foot or by bus), I take a whole bunch of carrier bags with me, so that I can reuse them. However (based on my experience a few years ago), if the supermarket send out a van, they only pack 1-2 items into each (brand new) bag, so I wind up swimming in the things afterwards. I think I heard about one company that will now take bags back on their next trip, although I don't know who that was. (I also suspect that they'd only accept their own bags, not those from rival supermarkets.)
Also, can you really fit that much more stuff into a warehouse? Generally I'd say that warehouses are efficient because they use large boxes, e.g. a crate containing 5000 cans of Coke. However, if you need someone to be able to walk around and fill up a customer's individual order ("1 can of Coke, 1 copy of the Guardian, 2 Yorkie bars") then all of those boxes need to be open and accessible, so I'd expect you to effectively wind up with supermarket shelves again. It works ok for somewhere like Argos, where most of the boxes are fairly big, but I'm not sure how well it would work for food shopping. I don't know how it works at the moment - do the internet orders get filled up from the supermarket shelves or from the warehouse behind them? (I remember a TV advert with Prunella Scales, where a shop assistant was basically following her around to duplicate her order, but that may not be true to life.)
A dozen extra plastic bags don't even come close to outweighing the environmental impact of the bright lights, heating, etc. But you're right, they can and should be eliminated. And by walking/bussing to the shops, you're not being typical (at least, not by the standards of UK-outside-London).
Warehouse v. shops: according to Mr George, currently Internet orders are filled by people taking goods off supermarket shelves, which leads to very few carbon savings. He's talking about eliminating out-of-town superstores outright, and replacing them entirely with warehouses. But that's a good point: how efficient can you be if you're only taking a few things at a time out of a box? Presumably you can use caching - take big boxes of bananas or whatever to the order-preparation zone, use them up while filling orders, send someone with a forklift to get a new box when you run out or if you need something rare.
10) When it comes to supermarkets and unnecessary packaging, I think that home delivery makes things worse. When I go to the supermarket (on foot or by bus), I take a whole bunch of carrier bags with me, so that I can reuse them. However (based on my experience a few years ago), if the supermarket send out a van, they only pack 1-2 items into each (brand new) bag, so I wind up swimming in the things afterwards. I think I heard about one company that will now take bags back on their next trip, although I don't know who that was. (I also suspect that they'd only accept their own bags, not those from rival supermarkets.)
Also, can you really fit that much more stuff into a warehouse? Generally I'd say that warehouses are efficient because they use large boxes, e.g. a crate containing 5000 cans of Coke. However, if you need someone to be able to walk around and fill up a customer's individual order ("1 can of Coke, 1 copy of the Guardian, 2 Yorkie bars") then all of those boxes need to be open and accessible, so I'd expect you to effectively wind up with supermarket shelves again. It works ok for somewhere like Argos, where most of the boxes are fairly big, but I'm not sure how well it would work for food shopping. I don't know how it works at the moment - do the internet orders get filled up from the supermarket shelves or from the warehouse behind them? (I remember a TV advert with Prunella Scales, where a shop assistant was basically following her around to duplicate her order, but that may not be true to life.)
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Warehouse v. shops: according to Mr George, currently Internet orders are filled by people taking goods off supermarket shelves, which leads to very few carbon savings. He's talking about eliminating out-of-town superstores outright, and replacing them entirely with warehouses. But that's a good point: how efficient can you be if you're only taking a few things at a time out of a box? Presumably you can use caching - take big boxes of bananas or whatever to the order-preparation zone, use them up while filling orders, send someone with a forklift to get a new box when you run out or if you need something rare.
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