A Greener Way to Food Shop

Grocery shopping has become part of everyone’s daily lives whether you have to go to the local grocery store or supermarket to get that replacement container of milk or do a full shopping to fulfill the family’s planned weekly menu. To make that run to the store, you get in your car and drive a few miles to your favorite food shop.

If done several times a week, you consume fuel and emit carbon dioxide emissions. Multiply that by a few hundred thousand people and the ozone layer just gets a little thinner every day.

The University of Washington conducted a research project funded by the Oregon Department of Transportation and published in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum that came to the conclusion that ordering your food requirements from a grocery delivery service can substantially have a favorable impact on the environment.

Instead of having people getting into their cars to do their food shopping, ordering online from these delivery companies substantially lessened carbon dioxide emissions, almost by half. And if the deliveries were done within a neighborhood with a small cluster of deliveries, fully loaded trucks can lessen carbon dioxide gases emitted by 80 to 90 percent. This made food shopping a much greener experience.

According to a University of Washington associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, Anne Goodchild, “from an environmental perspective, grocery delivery services overwhelmingly can provide emissions reductions”. And from their research, they also concluded that ordering from online food delivery services could have a major impact on the environment in both the rural and urban areas as well.

So it’s something to think about when you sit down to a meal at home. You can have fresh and healthy food for you body knowing that in getting them you also contribute to the health and wellbeing of the planet.