Wednesday, December 4, 2024

Five easy ways to make your online shopping more sustainable this festive season

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Throughout the holiday season, the urgent need for sustainable consumption is clear. Some 300,000 tonnes of clothing and 471 million small electrical everyday items end up in household waste in the UK in a year, with the number of unwanted items increasing significantly just after Black Friday. The current trend of overconsumption is fuelling climate change, nature loss and pollution.

Meanwhile, the appetite for sustainability in our shopping is increasing. More than half of people in the UK are willing to spend more on environmentally friendly products. While the best thing for our planet is still to buy nothing or consume less, gift giving is a big part of our social and cultural life. The challenge is to balance showing our care to family and friends with leaving the least impact on the environment.

Online shopping, now making up 28% of the UK’s total retail sales, has changed our shopping experience with so many ads and options. As part of my research into consumption, I have interviewed 14 households in Oxfordshire who considered online shopping convenient, but also flagged that it resulted in “choice overload”.

Online shopping can indeed be a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can promote eco-friendly solutions and help eco-conscious shoppers make more sustainable choices. On the other, shopping websites often overwhelm or induce unnecessary consumption, especially with endless advertisements and promotions on social media.

So, here are five eco-conscious ways to improve your online shopping:

A key principle is to reduce the amount being bought, used and wasted. You can reduce your material footprint by substituting physical goods, such as books, CDs and DVDs, with virtual ones – known as “dematerialisation”. These substitutions have the potential for energy savings mainly by eliminating the production of physical items. A review of studies on replacing paper publications with e-books suggests a lifetime energy saving of 70-80%. Consider buying an e-book or audiobook instead of hard copies for your bookworm friends and relatives.

The internet has made it easier to shift from ownership to sharing resources with the community. Membership of a car-sharing club, for example, reduces the overall number of vehicles and increases occupancy. An industry report estimates that each shared car can replace approximately 9-13 private vehicles. In clothing, the most popular online shopping category in the UK, digital platforms also offer rentals for clothes and accessories.

For other items that only get used occasionally, such as party kits or DIY tools, many places in the UK offer a library of things, where people can browse online and borrow locally. Before buying a new pasta maker, why not check the library to borrow it for a day of fun? By reducing ownership and sharing resources, you can limit your resource consumption while also decluttering your home.

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