In the era of e-commerce, it takes a single click to order anything you’d like. But it takes a lot of energy to bring it to your door.
Items are shipped from factories, shuttled between warehouses and finally trucked to your home. This convenience comes at an environmental cost — transportation accounts for 29 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, with medium- and heavy-duty trucks accounting for nearly a quarter of that.
Technology enables this problem — and some will tell you that technology can help solve it.
Drones have been touted as a clean, fast way to appease our demand for quick deliveries. When Amazon.com Inc. unveiled a new design in June for its Prime Air delivery drone, it framed the initiative as part of its vision to make half its shipments net zero carbon by 2030. Wing, a division of Google parent Alphabet Inc., heralded its service as helpful in easing greenhouse gas emissions. After UPS first publicly flew a drone from the top of a delivery truck to drop off a package at a home, an executive called the test a “big step” toward reducing UPS’ emissions.