Ecommerce saves the planet

FOR WANT OF a new champion of Earthly causes, the ACI (American Consumer Institute) has published a study showing the impact of eCommerce on greenhouse gases.

Now hear this: IT could save the US over 555 million barrels of oil a year – this is about 11 per cent of its total oil imports. Unfortunately the US is a carbon-based economy, with carbon-based life forms that need carbon-driven chainsaws to hack down trees – otherwise they’ll have massive unemployment.

But tree huggers of America can now rejoice and end any qualms they had about using computer technologies, and particularly broadband (another shocka: “only one in two of every American household subscribes to broadband internet services”).

It seems that if USAsians used the interweb instead of their big fat cars, for example, the world would be a cleaner place.

Top “carbon savers” are eCommerce, Telecommuting, Teleconferencing, eMaterialization (that’s a new one!) and Telemedicine – eCommerce alone will save the US 37.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases each year, the estimates have it.

By moving from paper to online formats, newspapers save some 57 million tonnes over a 10-year period.

The study is derived from a paper by Boghani, Kimble and Spencer that claims that you will not only save the world, but also points out the advantages of a telecommunications-based economy that will save us 3.1 billion hours of personal time (NOT per person). µ

L’Inq
ACI Citizenresearch pdf