Our Mailing and Shipping Industry: Being Fast and Convenient Is Not Enough

Imagine you were Pheidippides, the ancient Greek messenger whom the Marathon commemorated, and you were in the middle of your famous 25-mile run. The exhausted you could never imagine the appearance of the post office, the invention of mail trucks, and, needless to say, the development of Airmail. Over the past few centuries, especially the past few decades, the mailing and shipping industry changed dramatically. From being the privilege of the prestigious families to becoming the essential service to every individual, the mailing and shipping industry significantly convenient people and stimulate global developments. However, just like all the developments, the evolving process of this industry is not perfect; along with all the benefits it brings, the side effects are concerning. Among all the side effects it has, two are most problematic: the pollution during the distribution process and the waste of packaging materials.
Compared to the old days when a lette from New York needed to travel for weeks to arrive in California, the modern mailing and shipping system are extraordinarily efficient. Because of the formation of the whole shipping network which contains a variety of facilities, trucks, ships, and even airplanes; people are able to enjoy receiving their letters, documents and purchases in a short amount of time. However, as a result of this complex distribution process, CO2 level inevitably increases.
It is commonly known that the vehicles and machines powered by fossil fuels produce CO2, a global warming gas. Our mailing system, which strongly relies on these types of transportations, has large CO2 emissions as one of its major side effects. Airplanes, for instance, produce the largest amount of CO2 under the same circumstances compared to other types of transportations. Since Airmail is becoming more and more popular due to its time efficiency, its size is growing rapidly; consequently, its overall pollution increases every year. In addition to mail planes, there are also many other kinds of mailing vehicles. USPS has about 140,000 aging trucks that have terrible fuel economy in service. These trucks not only play major roles in USPS, the most essential mailing system in America, they create a tremendous amount of pollution as well. Last but not least, trucks of USPS, UPS, FedEx, Amazon are common in every neighborhood. These widespread routes make mailing and shipping service more available to our community; however, these routes of different companies are mostly redundant, thus, causing more CO2 to be produced.
However, it is not impossible to reduce the CO2 pollution while keeping the efficiency of our mailing and shipping system. To reduce the pollution caused by Airmail, we can raise the price of Airmail. By increasing the shipping fees and making the difference in price between regular shipping and Airmail shipping, only people who truly need to send or receive their mail would purchase these services. Hence, less Airmail trips would be needed, and less CO2 would be produced. Additionally, to protect the environment from the pollution of ground transportations, the industry could switch their vehicles to electrically powered ones. USPS planned to introduce 10,000 electric trucks to the national market starting from 2022 and many other shipping companies have similar plans. Understanding of the environmental impacts of modern mailing, the mailing companies are willing to gradually make the industry more sustainable.
Besides the emission of CO2 during the distribution process, another pollution comes from the plastic and paper waste during the packaging process. If you have purchased anything online or opened any package, you must have noticed how “secure” most of the packages are. Amazon, which packs over 10 million packages daily, is famous for its poor packing choices. Customers frequently find and complain about over-sized packages and bubble wraps that come with products they ordered. Just imagine the wastes accumulated from the millions of orders each day. What’s more problematic, only a small portion of these wastes are recycled; 65% of them end up with incarnation or landfills, producing harmful pollutants such as dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls.
On one hand, packages and cushions are essential to protect the shipments from damaging; on the other hand, they are difficult to recycle or reuse. Luckily, online retailers have noticed this negative influence and offered some solutions. To alleviate these problems, each individual customer may carefully check all the packing options that the online shop offers. By simply consolidating orders, customers can save a great amount of packaging materials; furthermore, the more orders being consolidated, the less boxes would appear at your front door. In addition, customers can utilize these packing materials at home, maybe build a playhouse for kids or even unfold them and store them in the garage for future use. Such methods are not only great for long-term sustainability, but also great for family benefits. Moreover, the shipping companies can even use reusable boxes and other “greener” materials for shipments. By choosing containers that are tougher, shipping companies can use them over and over again, making huge potential savings while protecting the environment.
Although the mailing industry develops rapidly, shortens the distance between places, and makes individuals’ lives convenient, many flaws, especially on the environmental sustainability aspect, still exist. The shipping process has become more time efficient and extensive at the expense of our environment. It is true that the mailing industry is gradually realizing this problem and it is obvious that the mailing industry has taken some actions to fight it; however, those are insufficient, extremely insufficient. If you want yourself to benefit more from the mailing system, if you expect our earth to gradually recover from the pollutions, and if you hope that your future generations can enjoy the same, or even better, view as you do, please fulfill your role as not only a beneficiary of the current mailing and shipping system, but more as an implementer who improve it.

Bibliography:

Hirsch, Jerry. “Postal Service Delays Production Contract for New Mail Truck.” Trucks.com​, Jerry Hirsch, 13 May 2020, www.trucks.com/2020/05/12/postal-service-delays-mail-truck-production-contract/. Ocampo, Josh. “How to Reduce Your Amazon Packaging Waste.” ​Lifehacker​, Lifehacker, 8 Aug. 2019, lifehacker.com/how-to-reduce-your-amazon-packaging-waste-1837036164. Williams, Deborah. “Amazon Packaging Waste: Current Operations and Future Plans.” Packaging Gateway​, 5 Aug. 2019, www.packaging-gateway.com/features/amazon-packaging-waste/​.
Dell, Jan. “157,000 Shipping Containers of U.S. Plastic Waste Exported to Countries with Poor Waste Management in 2018.” ​Plastic Pollution Coalition​, Plastic Pollution Coalition, 6 Mar. 2019, www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2019/3/6/157000-shipping-containers-of-us-plastic- waste-exported-to-countries-with-poor-waste-management-in-2018.