Sustainable Shopping Habits in the Age of On-Demand Convenience
Sustainable Shopping Habits in the Age of On-Demand Convenience There’s a weird tension I keep running into. I care about not being wasteful, genuinely, but I also live a life where getting groceries delivered instead of driving to three different stores just makes more sense some weeks. For a while I assumed those two things couldn’t coexist. Mostly I was wrong about that, though it took some trial and error to figure out where the actual tradeoffs are. Convenience And Sustainability Aren’t Automatically Opposites The assumption a lot of people carry around is that anything convenient must be bad for the planet somehow, and anything sustainable must require extra effort. That’s not really true once you look closer. A single delivery van dropping off groceries for a dozen households on one route can actually use less fuel overall than a dozen separate car trips to the store. It’s not a guarantee, obviously. Depends on the route, the vehicle, how far everyone lives from each other. But ...