Delivery Rivals Teaming Up Could Slash Emissions by a Wild 80%

Turns out, getting your latest impulse buy to your doorstep in China might be nine times worse for the planet than anyone thought. That's the slightly inconvenient truth dropped by new research. But before you swear off online shopping entirely, there's a surprisingly simple solution: getting rival delivery companies to play nice.

Researchers just crunched some serious numbers on what they call "last-mile" emissions — that final, often exhaust-fume-filled sprint a package makes to your door. And they found that if two key strategies are deployed, carbon emissions from those deliveries could plummet by over 80%. Let that satisfying number sink in.

The Power of Teamwork (and EVs)

First up, the obvious: electric vans. Swapping out gas guzzlers for EVs across China could knock down last-mile emissions by 18.2%. Smaller cities, bless their less-congested hearts, would see nearly a 30% cut, while bigger metropolises would manage about 7%. Every bit helps.

But the real showstopper? Cooperation. Imagine if all six major delivery companies in China decided to, well, coordinate. Instead of three different vans from three different companies showing up on your street to drop off three different packages, one van could handle them all. If they went full kumbaya, emissions could drop by a staggering 66%. The Chinese government has apparently been nudging them this way since 2018. Someone get them a whiteboard and some snacks.

Combine both strategies — electric vans and rival companies working together — and you're looking at a jaw-dropping 84.2% reduction in last-mile emissions. Which, if you think about it, is both impressive and slightly terrifying that we haven't been doing this all along.

The Real Tally

Previous studies on this topic were, shall we say, a bit optimistic. They were small-scale or model-based, meaning they likely lowballed the actual environmental cost of all those brown boxes. This new analysis, however, went big: 14 billion orders from JD.com (a major e-commerce platform) and smartphone location data from 1.9 million couriers across 365 Chinese cities. Because if you're going to figure out emissions, you might as well go all in.

China, for context, handles nearly 60% of the world's parcel volume. In 2023, couriers there traveled over 70 million miles every single day, spitting out 1.59 million metric tonnes of CO2. That's a lot of cardboard and carbon.

Interestingly, while orders jumped by 83.5% between January 2023 and January 2024, emissions only rose by 31.3%. This suggests that the emissions per package actually went down by about 28%. So, as computer scientist Zhiqing Hong from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology points out, better logistics and routing are already making a difference. Now imagine what could happen if they just started sharing vans.