/digital

We used to say that ecommerce would be greener than conventional retail. We made a big fuss about it in the early days. We said that the shift to ecommerce was part of a bigger shift away from inefficient modes of fulfillment towards optimised, just-in-time supply chains and all that.

Specifically, as an industry, we used to say:

• ecommerce will save millions of customer miles annually. Driving a tonne-and-a-half of metal to the shops for a Babyshambles CD, some milk and a bag of cat litter will be a thing of the past.
• Inefficient networks of thousands of stores - expensively heated and lit year-round - will be replaced by smaller networks of cold-and-dark regional hubs staffed by robots
• Hyper-efficient, route-optimised delivery firms will shunt groceries and hard goods into homes twice as economically as the people who actually live there ever could.

Of course, all of this still applies. Using Amazon.com's fine-tuned supply chain to get that Babyshambles CD to your house probably is greener than going and getting it yourself in the Hummer.

It's just that dozens of other slightly less convenient truths have pressed in to dent our confidence in the transformative power of that little 'e'. For instance:

• One-at-a-time distribution of items like books, bottles of wine, toiletries and clothing is unarguably inefficient. A blizzard of jiffy bags is hardly a sane replacement for older, more organised modes of delivery.
• The shift to ecommerce is almost certainly not reducing the environmental impact of retail, just displacing it to less easily monitored parts of the economy: courier firms, for instance. Bricks & mortar retailers are at least visible and can be held to account in the consumer marketplace (witness the kicking Tesco's have been getting in the media lately).
• The long tail of smaller pure-play ecommerce businesses that constitutes probably 50% of ecommerce by value in the UK is not in any sense carbon-optimised. Massive duplication (in routes, packaging, storage and administration) cancels the savings that might be expected from not running physical stores.
• ecommerce businesses don't discriminate between obviously inefficient activities and more benign ones. We've all got our favourite horror story: Water on sale at Amazon.com is mine but many products really shouldn't be shipped in the post or by courier. Some of our own products here at KMI are a worry, for instance. Although our best known products are highly concentrated and very light (shaving oils, for instance), others are dense (80% water!) and it's difficult to justify shipping a £3.99 shave gel in the post (especially by airmail).

The industry is just waking up to this and, to be fair, the data's not in yet. Research sponsored by the retail industry at places like Heriot Watt University is in its early stages. Most of retail's sustainability effort has, so far, gone into the much more obvious problem areas of trucking, energy use in stores, packaging and other supply chain issues.

It's pretty certain, though, that the greens are about to start paying attention so action will be needed soon. The ecommerce industry has begun to move but efforts are so far defensive. The IMRG, the trade body, has an awards scheme which looks dangerously like a whitewash effort, for instance.

What the industry needs to do now is to make a start on some industry-wide initiatives (it's essential that they're not confined to single firms) to identify sources of waste and environmental damage and then to neutralise them. Some measures will probably be unpalatable to large parts of the business, especially to hard-pressed pure-play online stores.

Our own plans here at KMI are quite radical but won't suit businesses dependent for 100% of revenues on the Internet. I'd like you to watch this space. I'll be sharing plans to reduce our own online carbon footprint here over the coming weeks. I'd also welcome your questions and comments, especially if you're in a similar role yourself or have any useful ideas to share.