Is that eagerly awaited red envelope ‘greener’?

Add comment January 9th, 2009

I stumbled upon the Slate headline “Is your Netflix queue destroying the environment?”the other day.

I have to say, I never thought about it, but renting via store and mail are apparently about the same, carbon footprint-wise, until “the last few miles.”

The mail option wins by a nose.

Packaging accounts for another chunk of the difference between renting online or from the video store. It takes a significant amount of energy to make the lockable polypropylene case that you might get at a video store—by the Journal of Industrial Ecology estimate, about as much as you’d need to drive to and from the mall. And compared with a mail-order Tyvek sleeve, a video-store case takes up more space when it’s shipped from the main distribution center.