John Lewis’s appetite for shed space is, at its heart, the story of the explosion of home delivery – a story in which we have all been willing participants, since it is our clicking and swiping that has powered the boom. The e-commerce industry lives and dies by metrics, a few of which give us some grasp over this phenomenon. The sprawl of sheds like Magna Parks 1 to 3 are a particularly vivid measure, because they host the final moment of relative stasis for millions of products that are then sprayed out to homes in every direction. Amazon’s biggest fulfilment centre in the UK, in Tilbury, Essex, occupies 2m sq ft. (In comparison, Amazon’s first shed, leased in 1997, was 93,000 sq ft.) The volume of daily deliveries to homes has soared – from fewer than 360,000 a day in New York City in 2009 to more than 1.5m today. In China, Meituan’s scooter drivers, in their banana-yellow helmets and jackets, delivered 30m food orders during a single weekend in July. There are numbers for distressing waste: the packaging of home-delivered products now accounts for 30% of the solid rubbish the US generates annually, and the cardboard alone costs 1bn trees. And there are numbers for frenzied growth: the $3.8tn (£2.95tn) in global online sales in 2017 will near $6tn by 2024.[...]
Houchens refers to the last mile’s tribulations as “hazards,” and her job is to engineer the cardboard box to withstand them. As a materials scientist, she knows plenty about harsh conditions. In the past, she worked for a Nasa contractor that designed spacesuits, and for another firm that developed military parachutes and ballistic vests for Operation Desert Storm. That is the calibre of person who, in the age of express delivery, is working on sciencing-up the plain cardboard box. Universities have packaging design labs now; at the Rutgers School of Engineering laboratory, they even test “decoration adhesion”, to see how well labels stick to the box. UPS and FedEx keep in-house researchers to study corrugated cardboard. Houchens’s team has grown from seven members in 2014 to 85 today, and they work with more than 800 sizes and classes of boxes. For an artefact that lasts just minutes at its destination before proceeding to the recycling bin, the box is subject to an astonishing volume of thought. [...]
The environmental impact of all that paper and plastic is just one part of Amazon’s overall carbon footprint: equivalent to 44.4m tons of carbon dioxide, as the company revealed for the first time in September. That is less than Walmart’s, but bigger than that of Apple, UPS or Denmark. The statistic doesn’t really clarify whether home delivery is worse for the planet than a trip to the shop, though. In 2009, researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh estimated that a shopper emits 24 times more carbon dioxide if she drives 12.8 miles to buy a single item than if she orders it online. Admittedly, in the world of last-mile logistics, 2009 feels like a lifetime ago – a gentle era predating two-hour delivery or chronic try-and-return behaviour, which make an online shopper’s carbon footprint bigger than that of a traditional shopper. [...]
At first glance, the Well-line, as Chetwoods calls it, feels like an example of this – an asset funded by taxpayers, built by a public utility that has itself been privatised. And we might say the same about other new wrinkles in e-commerce. The mixed-use Shed of the Future, as described to me by the architect James Nicholls, would incorporate housing, retail, transport and logistics. “Beds and sheds,” he said, “like the model villages of the 19th century.” Several logistics executives told me that if half-full freight vans from multiple firms kept congesting the streets, the best solution might be for every retailer to use a single firm instead. One delivery service to rule them all – just like the postal service of yore. The lockers now offered by numerous startups as well as by Amazon and UPS – born out of the frustration of failed deliveries to shoppers who aren’t home – resemble regular PO boxes. The alternative to lockers is to deposit parcels for pick-up at a convenient point near the house: a greengrocer’s or a cafe or a bodega. It put me in mind of a business plan: a neighbourhood outlet that exists to hold deliveries that customers can collect for a small fee, and that stocks some bare essentials besides. Milk, perhaps, and eggs and bread, and some stationery and detergent. A general store in all but name.
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