Is grocery home delivery good for the environment?

humanbeing_2

I drive for sainsburys - and just a few observations, im not sure myself if its better for the environment. Would make an interesting study.

We cover such a large area its quite possible i will travel 140 miles for just 12 deliveries. Thats about half a tank, or 40+ litres of diesel i guess.

Lots of those i deliver to would not have driven to sainsburys anyway if delivery wasnt an option, they would have previously shopped locally, or used a nearer / different supermarket.

Ive often gone on a 50 mile round trip to deliver £25 of groceries. Not sure how relevant that is but i presume that person would have previously bought those items locally.

As far as the carrier bags are concerned, lots of customers believe they are re-used, not just recycled, so they dutifully flatten them all out and hand them back. In reality they are just thrown into a skip that bales them into plastic bales to be taken away. Not sure what happens after that ill try to find out tomorrow.
Some customers even make you stand and wait while they empty the shopping to give them back to you. That is extremely annoying when you have another 14 deliveries to do in the rain before you can go home.

Like the comment about the rubbish substitutes! It is a problem, but it is really hard to know what someone else would pick. Some customers believe that we had the item they wanted but are just trying to get the customer to take something more expensive. No one can honestly believe that a shopper paid £5.50 an hour and constantly bullied by management can really give a fig if sainsburys make an extra 25p? They are just doing thier job as quick as they can so as not to get hasseled.

Oh - you have to factor in if i have a spare hour i have to leave the van running at the side of the road or in the yard to keeper the chiller cold so sainsburys dont get sued for thawed chicken guts.

humanbeing_2

Volcano wrote:

I was involved in Iceland's (the supermarket) initial implementation of home delivery when it first started in 1997. The only outlay as far as extra staff were concerned were the drivers, they just cracked the whip to get the existing staff to cope. Deliveries are grouped together for convenience (and profit's) sake, so it is rare to make a one-off delivery a long distance away.

Depending on the distribution of the deliveries, the vans would do between 6-12 'drops' in a 2 hour slot (including loading), I'm guessing they covered about 35 miles in this time.

Remember that the van is driving with a warm, newish engine so is relatively efficient compared to several cold-starting, short distance, cars of varying ages.

For me, the £3.99 delivery charge is actually less than the money I would spend on petrol getting there and back (as I live quite a distance from supermarkets), nevermind the hassle of shopping, parking, screaming kids etc.

But dont you have to do your own shopping in iceland and then they just deliver it to you? Thats what our local one does. Previously that van journey would not have been made and if that person didnt have a car they would have carried it or shopped more locally?

humanbeing_2

ts_aly2000 wrote:

"My shopping is 12p cheaper at Tesco's and I get to sit at home on my fat bum and watch a DVD,"

Martin would be pleased with that though!

Seriously, theres no doubt the supermarkets are doing everything they can to get every penny of business from everyone else.

Some days are free delivery days. Those customers may live 10 miles away and may order all cheap brand shopping and offers. I will be paid £5.50 for that hour, I may be two minutes late (no, i probably will if its me, im not losing my licence for those monkeys), and give them a £10 voucher, as well as the van running costs (dont forget things like tyres go very quickly on those things), mobile phones, insurances etc
Considering shopping is so cut to the bone profit wise, the supermarket is almost certainly running at a loss for that postcode at least.

Apparently its the fastest growing department, way way ahead of anything else.

humanbeing_2

ts_aly2000 wrote:

Sorry, that's the way it is. And remember... I don't care what you think. All I want to hear is that yes, maybe you've considered your ways and are now walking 1/2 mile to the local shop and buying veg that was grown in a field.

Well said.
As columbo would say -Just one more thing.

Can you believe i live in a pretty rural part of the country and deliver to many farmhouses, some actually working farms, with real live carrots and everything. But they still order vegetables from sainsburys.

Volcano

But dont you have to do your own shopping in iceland and then they just deliver it to you?

Yep, they aren't as advanced as the others, though I was just giving people an idea of the process behind home deliveries.

And remember... I don't care what you think.

Real nice, thank god for balanced arguments and reasoned conclusions eh?

SusanCarter

ts_aly2000 wrote:

Yes. It's bad for the environment. It's so that lazy people can do even less than they do now. And I'll be slated left right and centre for saying that but don't mistake yourself into thinking that your words are going to get very far.

Delivery is not a new thing. When I was a child I had many children's story books which had been my mum's when she was a child. Many of them mention the butcher/baker/grocer's delivery boy. I have also heard in real life of the following being delivered or sold door to door: milk, veg, fish, ice-cream and coal. Obviously in the past these deliveries would not have had the same environmental impact but deliveries are not a new thing caused by modern laziness.

ts_aly2000 wrote:

If people weren't so bloody tight, and didn't compare to the point of, "My shopping is 12p cheaper at Tesco's and I get to sit at home on my fat bum and watch a DVD," then all of the little shops would still exist, and you'd still be eating proper carrots grown in the ground and not hydroponically in as shorter time as possible, and as cheaply as possible.

But "all of the little shops" don't still exist so we have to consider what is the best thing to do in the current situation. I don't know about the bulk of people on these forums but personally, I don't think I bear any responsibility for the fact that so many little shops don't exist as I only left home and became responsible for my own shopping four years ago.

ts_aly2000 wrote:

Sorry, that's the way it is. And remember... I don't care what you think. All I want to hear is that yes, maybe you've considered your ways and are now walking 1/2 mile to the local shop and buying veg that was grown in a field.

I think the majority of people on the Green/Ethical forum are here to consider their ways and that was in fact the purpose of this thread. Someone on another thread said that her father is a greengrocer (or used to be) and that little fruit and veg shops usually buy from wholesalers so the source of their fruit and veg is unlikely to be different to that of the supermarkets. I also suspect tha many people would not be able to find a shop fitting your description within half a mile.

Anyway back to the original topic of whether home delivery is better than driving there yourself. I think there has been a similar thread in the past so I may see if I can find it and post the link. I guess the question depends on the following factors:
a) How far does the van drive (obviously factored into this would be time when the engine is kept running as per humanbeing's post) on the delivery route and how much environmental impact does this have?
b) How far would each person on the given route have driven if they hadn't had the delivery and how much environmental impact would this have had?
Both of these would depend on the distribution of people requesting delivery and how well planned the delivery route/timings were.

Take an imaginary van which makes ten deliveries:
Scenario 1: All the customers live in the same street and deliveries are made consecutively in the minimum time possible. In this case, I would think that delivery is almost certainly "better".
Scenario 2: Each customer lives five miles from the supermarket so would have driven a total of ten miles. Unfortunately, the deliveries are not arrnaged in the shortest route so the driver has to drive close to ten miles between each delivery. In addition, there are large periods of time between the deliveries during which the driver has to park and leave his engine running. I imagine that in this scenario, delivery would be "worse".

Obviously, (or at least I hope) no supermarket is going to be so inefficient as scenario 2 and I think scenario 1 is rather utopian so all deliveries are going to be somewhere in the range between the two. I therefore don't think that we can really have any way of knowing whether a given delivery route has been better for the environment. However, I would expect supermarkets are going to try to be efficient in the interests of costs which would therefore improve the chances of delivery being "better" for the environment. Also, the more people who have delivery, the more efficient and therefore better for the environment it will be.

SusanCarter

Here's the previous thread I mentioned if anybody's interested:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=215146