Online Shopping
Credit: Steamy Raimon/Cartoonstock
Even to an environmentalist, online shopping has its benefits. There are certain things that one requires that cannot always be purchased locally. In my case, that’s vegan dog food. It is much better for the environment (and my dog) than the meat varieties, but the two oversized pet shops in my region do not stock it. Like most pet retailers, they are of the unfortunate believe that one cannot operate a store devoted to the wellbeing of animals without filling it with dead ones.
As the nearest pick-up option for vegan dog food is interstate, it is obviously preferable to order it online and have professional transporters drop it at my house. They will be transporting my cardboard box along with hundreds of other interstate online purchases, so the transport carbon emitted for my kibble will be a lot less than had I driven there to pick it up myself. It will also be quite a bit cheaper and won’t require three days off work.
Even if they were transporting it from Canada, which they very well may be, I don’t feel guilty about ordering long-distance vegan dog food online as I only need to order it every few months. More importantly, the contents weren’t produced via grain that was grown, harvested and delivered to another unfortunate animal who ate several meals of it each day of its depressingly short life; who was then shipped to a terrifying slaughterhouse, murdered, transported in pieces to a processing plant, combined with a range of unpronounceable additives, and turned into pellets of dried food. There is a whole lot of carbon and cruelty saved when we take out those middle steps and just turn the grain into kibble.*
On occasion, I do have to order something else online, but those moments are infrequent and usually involve things that cannot be jammed into a backpack, a bicycle basket or, in special circumstances, a three-door hatchback. The fridge, for example. As I aim only to purchase what I absolutely need, and I try to keep my waste and transport footprint to a minimum, online shopping is generally avoided.
Now, many people will argue that one’s transport-related carbon footprint is much lower if you get items delivered, rather than pick them up yourself. This is quite reasonable. If you stop and start your SUV through Saturday morning traffic for half an hour in order to get to the local shopping centre simply to purchase the hot pink trainers you saw online, you’ve probably burnt more fossil fuels than had the company trucked it to a local delivery hub and a driver dropped it at your house. As several of your neighbours will have also shopped online, the carbon cost of transporting your new trainers will be shared amongst all the new trainer wearers in your area.
The trouble with this logic is it assumes that these are the only options. There are, in fact, several more, and from an environmental perspective, they are better.
The first option is that the buyer of said trainers puts their must-have items on a list instead of purchasing them straight away and then waits until they have to be in the sports store area for another, completely unavoidable reason, such as a haircut. As haircuts (thankfully) cannot be online shopped, humans must always travel somewhere to get one. Quite often that place is a shopping centre, where sports stores also tend to be located, which means both activities can be done during the same trip. Sure, it will be an expensive Saturday morning, but the anticipation of owning hot pink trainers can be something to enjoy in the weeks building up to the haircut, and something to make you feel better when the cut doesn’t go as planned.
If a more urgent shoe purchase is required, thus making a single-purpose shopping centre trip unavoidable, the key is to get there without driving. Many fortunate suburbanites have a shopping centre within walking, cycling or skateboarding distance. These are the best options, particularly if one wants to put their (already sufficient number of) trainers to good use. A wheelchair or scooter is also a good option, if you happen to require one, and anyone that pushes a manual wheelchair all the way to the shoe store gets additional environmental brownie points for effort. If none of that is feasible, there are often buses or trains that stop within walking distance of a shoe-selling outlet.
These travel options will all take longer than the car, but nothing is truly satisfying unless it requires a bit of hard work. If one wants to maximise the feeling of elated satisfaction one should always feel on becoming the owner of hot pink trainers, a slower, more challenging transport option is essential. Short of designing, cutting out, and sewing the shoes yourself, the only way those trainers will evoke an enormous sense of achievement is if you brave the riffraff on the local bus route when you journey out to get them.
The last (and most environmentally profound) alternative shopping option is realising, prior to charging it to the credit card, that a new pair of hot pink trainers is not a good idea. This is generally the most challenging of all options, as buying things for oneself feels wonderful… even when one probably can’t afford them and especially when one really doesn’t need any of the items being purchased. Fortunately, this is also where shopping locally reigns supreme. When one has to put in a bit of time and effort to obtain it, there is likely to be a delay between the decision to purchase and the act of purchasing ─ and that gap is essential.
If the delay between seeing the trainers online and purchasing said trainers is less than thirty seconds, the likelihood of purchase regret will be high. If that same potential buyer sees the shoes online on Tuesday night and decides to wait till Saturday morning to go down and get them, it is plausible they will have changed their mind by the time the weekend arrives. Three days is, after all, more than enough time to realise the sneakers won’t go well with one’s favourite tracksuit pants, to acknowledge the abysmal state of one’s bank accounts, to think of more enjoyable ways to spend one’s Saturday morning, and to find better—or, at least, pinker—things to buy. Come Saturday morning, it is highly likely the potential buyer will opt for a sleep in, then put on one of the many, perfectly acceptable, pairs of trainers they already own and take the dog for a long walk instead.
Rather than immediately purchase any products we find online, it is more sensible to just have a ‘Not Overly Pressing or Essential’ (NOPE) shopping list and add them all to that. The Our Groceries or Microsoft To-Do List apps work perfectly fine, as does a notepad, if you happen to have one sitting in a drawer. A virtual cart attached to an online store that sends you reminders about the un-checked out items twice a day is not a good option, and should be avoided, as you will likely find yourself buying things you don’t really need just to avoid feeling shamed for purchase indecision by the automated emailing system of a persuasive online retailer.
Personally, I keep a NOPE shopping list on the Our Groceries app for all of my necessary-but-clearly-not-necessary-enough-to-actually-purchase items. It is always very long and there are quite a few things that have been on there for a while, so will probably be purchased at some point (i.e. ‘table’, ‘overhead fan’, and ‘a pair of melancholy rescue rabbits that I will call Leonard and Cohen’). It is debatable quite how essential all of those items are, but they have remained on the list longer than most things. For example, ‘garden lights’, ‘miniature greenhouse’ and ‘garden bench’ were all removed shortly after the momentary urge to buy them had passed and I had acknowledged the fact that I did not have a garden. Occasionally an item from my NOPE list does get purchased (e.g. ‘solar panels’), but most things just end up getting deleted.
I never tell myself I can’t have something, despite the fact that I never have any money in my bank account. If I come across an item that would make my life better, I always put it on the list with the resolute believe that I will buy it. It just turns out the version of me that desperately needs the thing I’ve only just thought of and have spent the last half hour googling is really not very reliable. That is the version of me that spends two hours selecting a European handcrafted indoor rabbit enclosure, despite not having a rabbit. Once selected, I have come to realise that these items are best added to my special shopping list so that the version of me alive several weeks from now can decide if they need to be bought. (They don’t.)
Online shopping is very appealing to the current version of ourselves, and the rise of highly efficient delivery services ensures that we’ll have received our exciting new purchases before we’ve even worked out where—on the shelves already crammed with other inane and regretful purchases—we’re going to put them. Without an adequate amount of pre-purchase contemplation, many things will be bought that really don’t need to be, meaning a whole lot of fossil fuels will be expended for the sole purpose of filling houses with clutter.
When future generations learn that the people living through this period of history (i.e. the era that completely plundered the Earth’s natural resources and filled the air with carbon) used quite a lot of those resources manufacturing unessential possessions which were, one by one, delivered to houses to be added to shelves to be relocated to plastic tubs to be stored in cupboards to be moved to garages to be (when the possessor finally got around to a clean out) transferred to a rubbish dump, what will be their response?
I imagine future generations will feel outraged, appalled, disappointed, and irritated (although that last feeling will have more to do with the fact that life has become a series of long, oppressive heat waves, and long, oppressive heat waves tend to make people irritated). I imagine they will look back on this environmentally well-informed yet stuff-obsessed period in history with dismay, confusion and disgust — the generation that knowingly heated up and destroyed a perfectly nice planet because we just couldn’t stop buying perfectly pointless stuff.
Now, you might argue that some items are essential and absolutely can’t wait. Say your rabbit chewed through your phone charger, you’ve only got a quarter of the battery left, you have a job interview this afternoon for a position heading a team of climate scientists on an ice saving expedition in Greenland, and the interview is only going to happen if you can hotspot through your mobile. In those moments, I would recommend high-tailing it in your diesel-fuelled Hummer to the nearest JB Hi-Fi and getting that new charger sorted. For anything less urgent, it would be better to just add it to your NOPE list and the next time you cycle to the shopping centre for some other unavoidable reason, pick the item up locally.
Or, better yet, enjoy the lovely feeling of time, money and bother saved by deleting an unnecessary item off an almost entirely unnecessary shopping list and then go borrow something wonderful from the local library, instead.
The Quiet EnvironmentalistFurther reading:
It’s Too Easy to Buy Stuff You Don’t Want - The Atlantic
What Happens to All the Stuff We Return? | The New Yorker
* Some people may think vegan food is cruelty to dogs, but I can assure you that my dog is perfectly happy with my ordering decision. I’d like to say this is because she appreciates being thirteen and in exceptional health, but it is mostly because she can’t do her own online shopping so has no idea there are keto options available. For the sake of her longevity, the environment, and the animals that really are treated with horrific cruelty, let’s not mention any alternatives to her.
Published 5 October 2025
