MENDOCINO CO., 12/23/25 – It feels simple: You shop, find something you want and click to buy. It shows up today, overnight or tomorrow. We’ve gotten used to that speed. But that convenience comes with a climate cost.
Multiple factors shape the environmental toll of a delivery. These include the distance from a fulfillment center, whether the shipment rides in a half-empty truck, how many trips a driver makes in the same area and the type of transportation used to move the package.
When customers choose faster shipping and earlier delivery dates, the system shifts from optimized routing to whatever gets the package out fastest, and that means higher emissions, said Sreedevi Rajagopalan, a research scientist at MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics. For example, trucks may leave warehouses before they’re full and drivers might loop the same neighborhood multiple times a day, she said.
“For the same demand, fast shipping definitely increases emissions 10 to 12%,” she said.
To meet tight delivery windows, retailers may rely on air freight, which produces far more emissions than other options such as trains, making it the most carbon-intensive.
“Given that companies want to be competitive in terms of speed, it comes at the cost of your efficiency,” Sreedevi said. “Vans are half full, and you make multiple rounds, multiple trips to the same location … your fuel consumption goes up, and you’re not able to consolidate.”
One way companies like Amazon try to minimize that is by placing their supply chain closer to customers to reduce mileage and improve speed for the customer. Their goal is to make the journey fast and effective, but reduce its emissions at the same time.
“By really leveraging our supply chain efficiencies that we have at scale, we’re able to both offer better speed and sustainability outcomes at the same time,” said Chris Atkins, director of Worldwide Operations Sustainability at Amazon.
The last mile
Getting items to customers’ doors from a fulfillment center — referred to as the “last mile” or “last kilometer” of shipping — is one of the hardest stages to make less polluting, Sreedevi said.
Emissions rise even more when customers place multiple small orders throughout the week.
“If I place an order this morning and then I place an order this evening and choose fast shipping, the company might have already processed my morning order and wouldn’t wait for my evening order to consolidate,” she said.
And sending more half-full trucks out on the road means more trips overall.
“Imagine you’re not only sending a half-full truck, you’re also bringing back that truck empty. … Emissions are going to go up,” Sreedevi said.
Reducing emissions
Consumers can lower emissions if they’re willing to wait even a tiny bit, and they’ll save money at the same time, said Christopher Faires, assistant professor of logistics and supply chain management at Georgia Southern University.
Delaying delivery by one to two days can result in a 36% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, and three to four days pushes that reduction to 56%, so opting for standard or delayed shipping instead of next-day or two-day shipping helps, according to Sreedevi.
Amazon’s Atkins said changes to their network are cutting emissions linked to fast delivery. The company has expanded the use of electric delivery vans and shifted more packages to rail and to delivering by foot or bicycle in dense cities.
“Aviation is very carbon-intensive relative to ground shipping,” said Atkins. “One of the other things that Amazon and other logistics companies are looking at doing is: How do we mode-shift to less carbon intensive forms of transportation?”
Amazon says providing shipping options that encourage customers to consolidate orders have also helped. Data for the first nine months of 2025 shows that when customers chose a single delivery day for all items, it reduced more than 300 million delivery stops and avoided 100,000 tons (90,718 metric tons) of carbon emissions, according to Atkins.
Consumers change behavior when they know the impact
People are more likely to delay or consolidate orders once they understand the environmental impact of fast shipping, according to Sreedevi, who co-authored a 2024 study of delivery customers in Mexico.
“A significant number of consumers decided to wait for longer delivery or delayed their shipping when we showed them the environmental impact information in the form of trees,” said Sreedevi. “So it’s important that they are educated.”
While fast shipping isn’t likely to go away, experts say its climate impacts can be meaningfully reduced through small behavior shifts, both from shoppers and companies. Bundling orders, skipping the overnight option and choosing a single weekly delivery can all make a difference.
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They just want a reason to release the drones. Here it is.
Now let’s talk about giant computer servers using our cold drinking water for cooling their equipment.
Bark up the right tree!
A quick Google search also reveals why ‘the rail trail’ is so important to the gubment.
Rail Tracks are being used and will be used as drone guide corridors, for inspection points and monitoring. Still think the people in power care about your recreation?
I think the GRT being built because delivery drones ‘can use the tracks to guide themselves’ is a bit far fetched. The tracks are already there for the drone to use without the GRT being built. Plus walking trails were a thing long before drone technology hit the scene.
Sorry, not that it’s being built, but that plans are in place to expand the trail into rural heart of nor cal. Hyping it up for “recreation” is just to get the public to okay the northward expansion. This isn’t just happening in California. Rail way corridors are already being used for ‘safe drone corridors’. You have google?
Natural Navigation: Tracks serve as linear, predictable guides, helping drones maintain precise paths, even in GPS-challenged areas, say researchers at the University of South Carolina and the Drones4Safety project.
, railway corridors are being developed and used as safe, efficient pathways for drones, acting as natural navigation guides for autonomous systems, especially for infrastructure inspection, monitoring, and security, reducing human risk and enabling precise, GPS-denied flights using track features for guidance and AI for operations. These corridors allow for detailed data capture, automated mission planning, and even self-charging via power lines, though security concerns about unauthorized drone use remain a key challenge.
Let’s say they do use the railroad for guidance; the walking trail really doesn’t matter, because the old rail lines already can act as a proverbial highway for drone flights assuming they are using them to guide drones. It seems a bit unrealistic given the GPS tech /Lidar/ etc is way more effective at directing drones than using landmarks. On top of it all, the airfields in Santa Rosa, and Ukiah, would take precedence over the skies. Drones would have to fly away from already established air highways set by the FAA.
Transparency, the drones need docking stations to recharge at intervals, and they need to stay out of public airspace, in a regulated road in the sky.
And the airports will be needed for passenger drones
Drone docking bays will be placed where reliable power exist. The GRT doesn’t seem conducive for a docking Bay area for drones given there would need to be ample electrical needs for the charging stations. They may likely set up docking stations where there is reliable power access points similar to where places like Tesla set charge stations. Cloverdale, Hopland, Ukiah, and Willits are fairly easy places to set up docking stations with or without the GRT. Most likely these docking station may be in or near the city hubs since volume is what keeps the price per a package reasonable.
Sounds more like a suburbs and urban planning problem. This article tittle should say ‘suburbs create more of carbon footprint than urban landscapes.’
Buy they don’t. Ups makes our rural routes once. Same package path from bay to ukiah out for coastal delivery weather you fast ship or not.
I’m sure Amazon is tracking which routes make sense to maintain and delaying other routes that don’t. It does eat into the bottom lines to have under utilized trucks. Volume of package deliveries this year are down (a lot). Some packages are arriving earlier than anticipated dates and some trucks are under utilized due to bad economics this year. It still beats everyone going out to individually shop at their local retail chain. A big reason delivery is so popular in America is due to the suburbs and the isolated homesteads people live in in the first place.
Containing urban sprawl is an outdated notion. It’s human nature to get out of the city and hack a life for yourself as far from Babylon as possible. People actually get cancer medicines delivered by ups, rural people. And ups provides their employees with insurance too. The point is, they want to get rid of rural routes because those are the first ones on which they’re gonna try the drone-delivery system. Amazon is building a center here. It’s clear as day. There’s not gonna be abundant gas, we are going electric. They will deliver packages to rural routes with drones. Tip your delivery driver!
Most of the world doesn’t develop suburbs as their primary form of housing. The notion that American suburbs are the end game in housing is quite misleading given the housing shortages, poor use of land, and extensive resource consumption that come with living far away from city hubs. Property insurance (along with climate change) is skyrocketing because of the numerous suburban developments over our past predecessors poor urban planning. The fact that car costs are starting to outpace wages (which is already happening) and developers only can build in places where they can get insurance coverage will start to make places like Ukiah and Willits the new affordable places to live. Rural living in short is just going to get exponentially more expensive whether it be cost of living, new taxes and/or declining county services. The fact that Amazon is pushing towards drones is keeping the costs of rural route areas solvent. It may only be limited relief for package delivery as cheap water goes away in Mendo and Lake and it will be one more reason why rural living is going to be more expensive and urban water infrastructure will win over the cost conscience populace.