2023-11-24 20:27:34
THE CHEKING PROCESS – According to Frédéric Duval, the general manager of Amazon France, purchases in store have a higher carbon footprint than those made online. Is this really the case?
The Black Friday period has established itself as the high point of online sales. And rivalries between digital platforms and merchants. In their recent media battle over a government communications campaign encouraging people to buy less, Christophe Béchu and Bruno Le Maire finally found a point of agreement: criticizing “rather online sales platforms than physical stores”and in particular the Chinese Shein, “which is based on a model which has no place, neither for the planet, nor for sustainability”bludgeoned the Minister of Ecological Transition.
This unilateral vision is rejected outright by e-commerce players. Like Frédéric Duval, the general director of Amazon France, who took offense this Friday in the columns of 20 Minutes. “E-commerce is less polluting than retail», thunders this figure of online sales. A position of rupture with the doxa, defended by an analogy. “We agree that if we asked everyone to collect their mail from the Post Office, it would be much more polluting than asking a postman to deliver the mail.r, says Frédéric Duval, Well, e-commerce is exactly this factor applied to the distribution of goods. To support his argument, the boss of Amazon France also relies on “three independent studies” who would have demonstrated his point. One from the international consulting firm Oliver Wyman, the other from the prestigious MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology), and the last from the French Agency for Ecological Transition, Ademe.
Except that with more than a billion packages delivered per year in France alone, greenhouse gas emissions from online commerce would be at least around a million tonnes of CO2, recalls the ‘Ademe at the opening of the cited study. A monumental figure which fuels doubt. With such high carbon emissions, how could e-commerce be less polluting than traditional commerce? Le Figaro tried to see things more clearly.
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