For a while before ITP I had tried to avoid Amazon as much as possible (mostly because of their shitty business practices, but also because of the environment costs of their warehouses and the waste of their unsold products), but after a few weeks at ITP I found this practice near impossible. With 3 week project turnarounds, even with the most advance planning I can do, I still ran into the problem of needing something very specific within a day or two to prototype with.
(Trust me when I say that I try to source these products locally as much as I can, but I think Amazon causes a negative feedback loop where local stores stop carrying as niche things because people buy them from Amazon, and that lack locally causes more people to buy the item online.)
As soon as I "lapsed" back, I noticed how easy it was to just reach for Amazon. There's a page from Stuart McMillen's comic "energy slaves" that really stuck with me, that we no longer appreciate the wonder of electricity because of its over abundance around us. Likewise, the Amazon one-click makes buying something way too easy, we don't worry about how many miles something needs to travel to get to us because we don't have to ever see it.
So for this measurement project, I decided to measure how far my Amazon deliveries travel to get to me, as a way of holding myself accountable.
To prep for this, I manually entered all my Amazon transactions for the year so far (1.5 months), all the cities the package traveled through, and the distance between those cities according to Google Maps.
(I do wonder if any of these packages are flown instead of driven, but for sake of simplicity I'll assume they're all driven. Also for sake of simplicity I'm going to ignore the impact of package weight.)
It turns out that in the 10 orders I've made in the past 1.5 months, my packages have traveled an approximate 5,128 miles. Here are some quick and dirty calculations:
| total miles | 5,128 |
| total kilometers | 8,252 |
| total mega joules1 | 110,169 |
| total "energy slave" years2 | 220 |
1 Based on an assumption of 1335MJ / km consumption for a bus, as listed in the Wikipedia page for Energy efficiency in transport. I used the figure for a bus because it was the closest to a delivery van I could find, but I'll try to find better numbers for this.
2 From the "energy slaves" comic, there's a data point measured by U.S., Swiss and German armies that an average man can do ~2,000 kJ of work in an eight hour day. Assuming 250 days of work in a year, the average man outputs 500MJ of work annually.
It is sobering to think (if I've done my calculations right), that my 10 orders have required an approximate 220 years of a person's labor, or alternatively, that in just this one aspect of my life I have had the equivalent of 220 people working a year for me in the span of 1.5 months.
Again, these numbers need further validation, but they're a sobering reminder of the cost of my life being more convenient.
bigger picture research
I started with googling "energy consumption for transporting goods" and landed on this article from U.S. Energy Information Administration that had two relevant insights: transportation accounts for 26% of total U.S. energy use, and that 90% of energy use in the transportation sector is still reliant on petroleum products.
But this article (nor its underline reports) didn't distinguish between transportation of people vs. goods, and I'm interested in goods. So after a little bit of googling I realized the term I'm interested in is freight transportation and was able to find a report also from EIA titled "Transportation sector energy consumption". Some interesting excerpts from the report:
- "Freight modes accounted for the other 39% of total world transportation energy consumption. Freight trucks made up by far the largest share (23%) of total transportation energy use, followed by marine vessels (12%) and rail and pipelines (a combined 4%)."
- "Total freight-related energy consumption grows by an annual average of 1.5% in the IEO2016 Reference case, from 40 quadrillion Btu in 2012 to 60 quadrillion Btu in 2040"
- Not as related to this research, but I found this interesting: "Passenger transportation—in particular, light-duty vehicles—accounts for most transportation energy consumption, with lightduty vehicles consuming more energy than all modes of freight transportation, including heavy trucks, marine, and rail combined."
- Approximately 80% of the world’s merchandise trade by volume is carried over water, with maritime trade in 2012 totaling nearly 60 trillion ton-miles. Because of globalized supply chains, maritime shipments of nonenergy commodities, such as manufactured goods, agricultural products, and minerals, have grown much faster than global GDP and accounted for approximately 60% of total maritime freight movement in in 2012. Significant amounts of energy commodities, such as crude oil from the Middle East and coal from Australia, also are transported internationally by cargo ships.
https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Freight-Transportation-Energy-Use-Environmental-Im/f7sr-d4s8