Opinion: The e-commerce boom doesn’t have to be a climate disaster

A UPS driver pushes a trolley with Amazon boxes during a delivery in New York, US. Knowing the carbon footprint – and the local traffic flow and acoustic impact – of every item sold is integral to corporations' self-optimising effort. — Bloomberg

Since it first showed up more than two decades ago, e-commerce has slowly eaten its way into the global retail landscape a few fractions of a percentage point at a time.

Hundreds of millions of consumers now buy billions of items online, which are delivered to them quickly via a sophisticated network of storage and distribution facilities. First came the shelf-stable items such as books and electronics, then food and fashion.