A good way to help the environment - force people and companies to ship more efficiently.
Shane February 13th, 2008
Alternate title: Boring ways we can save the Environment that no one talks about.
I have had some years of experience managing a warehouse that shipped parcels and freight, so I have seen how trucking companies and manufacturers waste space, which in today’s world equates to wasted resources. Only recently have companies started to work to become more efficient.
The main factor when shipping anything is Weight. The problem is that you get things like this =>
Here is the problem: shipping companies only factor in the dimensions of the box when they get to a certain size - small and mid-sized boxes are not charged based on size, but by weight only.
What happens is that manufacturers pack their packaging to be safe when shipped on a pallet. Look at the Nintendo Wii picture. Nintendo has styrofoam protecting the unit, but this amount of protection is not adequate for shipping the item through UPS, Fedex or the Post Office. They protect the item from being bumped around, not from being tossed into a UPS truck. In my experience if you do not think that a package could survive being dropped 4 feet onto the ground, you need more packaging before sending it on a UPS truck. I don’t think many people would drop a Wii box from that height - common sense tells you it need more protection.
There is also the problem that Nintendo (or any manufacturer) prints their boxes for retail sale. If you shipped the Wii box directly through UPS, you would have a bunch of UPS employees handling that box that all know there is a Wii inside. During Christmas season, how many of these would get ‘lost’? Exactly.
The end result of this is that any reseller like an Amazon.com will repack almost anything. Now back to the problem of how carriers charge their customers. As I said, they do not charge a premium until the box gets to a specific size. In the past, carriers would just charge a minimum weight once your package got to a set dimension. So for example, if you had a ten pound box, but your box was too big, they might charge you the thirty pound weight class, so you would pay as if your package weighed 30 pounds. With UPS, there were three tiers, called OS1, OS2, and OS3.
What do resellers do? They buy boxes that are just under that limit, and try to get everything they can into those boxes. When they buy boxes that are over the first ‘tier’, they will buy boxes that are just under the limit of the second tier. Why do this?
The cost of a slightly larger box is negligible compared to trying to stock 1000 different box sizes. Look at the Wii picture again. If whoever shipped that unit had put it in a box that was perfect for it (generally two to three inches larger on each side) it would cost them *exactly* the same to ship it as it cost to ship it in the larger box, except for the extra cost of the box, and the cost of the extra packing.
How would a Amazon.com know to stock boxes exactly that size? What happens when the next order comes down the line, and the item is about the size of the Wii box, but 5 inches longer? Do they stock a box for that item too? The problem here is that a company would have to get a larger warehouse, and stockpile a lot more boxes to get more efficient. No company wants to do this. And they have no incentive to either.
In the last year, UPS and I think Fedex have instituted ‘Dimensional Weights’. Now if your box is of a certain size, you figure out the density of the item using a formula provided by UPS. If the ‘Dimensional Weight’ of a box is sixty-five pounds, but your item weighs thirty, you still pay the sixty-five pound rate. Note though that this only applies to packages over a certain size. No one buying cds or books or cameras or even a laptop will ever have to worry about this. You need to get a box larger than 17″ cube to have Dimensional Weights kick in. This is a pretty sizable box.
What should happen is that all carriers should charge based on density for every package. One more time, look at the Wii picture. Now think of a tractor trailer filled with boxes just like that. Obviously, half of the truck is being used to ship not much more than air, and extra packaging (read: oil based product).
If carriers shipped this way, we could get more on a truck. This is happening already in a way, as UPS has already started charging based on dimensions, but not for all packages. This is a step forward, but not the best solution. UPS instituted this change because the cost of shipping has increased due to oil prices.
Why would we not then just charge this way for every package, and every carrier? How much gasoline could be saved just by UPS and Fedex shipping this way? I would think quite a bit would be saved. Why don’t carriers do this?
It is inconvenient. If you have shipped through the post office, you will see they just weigh a box, price it and ship it. If you bring in a pretty big box, they pull out a tape measure and measure it. If we did this with every package, they would have to measure every package every time.
Are you willing to wait in line more often at the Post Office, to help the environment? Unfortunately we cannot fix our problems by CFL light bulbs, Hybrids and Ethanol. At some point we need to be a little inconvenienced to do something good. This whole article is just one small example of how we could really change things - but those changes won’t be made because they inconvenience people. You might say “well as gas gets more expensive, carriers will make these changes anyway, that is how Capitalism works.”
Well not exactly. What happens is that UPS will incur more costs if gas gets more expensive, and will want to cut costs in *any area* of their business to compensate. If they worry that shipping every item using dimensional weights would irritate customers, they might cut costs by say… reducing the amount they pay on their employee’s medical insurance. Hey wait. Is there a huge problem with companies not wanting to pay for health care in America? Are the costs of doing business going up a lot due to increased energy costs?
Well what do you know. I am not saying that gas prices are making UPS cut health insurance, but eventually, companies will look for any way to cut costs to stay competitive. This is the Huge Flaw In Capitalism, in my opinion. Competition forces companies to be more efficient, but that change to gain efficiency might only be good for the company’s bottom line, and be very bad for society and/or our environment.
As a society, we need to say that we will deal with the inconvenience to help the environment, I think. If all carriers did this, and all manufacturers worked on this issue, it would be a huge cut in oil usage. Global Warming or Peak Oil, take your pick of issues…either way we must get more efficient or suffer the consequences. With things like this, we cannot afford to do nothing and in 10 years say ‘well hindsight is always 20/20 - who knew?’
- Business , Environment
- Comments(9)
Good post, the big gains are often not in flashy big ideas but instead doing boring simple stuff to save energy.
Use bubble wrap. They threw wrapped televisions out of the back of a moving van using different wrapping methods, and the one wrapped in bubble wrap still worked.
Another thing that UPS might do to offset higher gas prices, would be to increase prices for us the consumers. As long as we are willing to pay it, they would not need to be more efficient with their energy and resource consumption.
… anything to reduce your carbon footprint. I’m thinking much more drastic things will have to be done to save the planet.
We encourage the use of used cardboard boxes. You’d be amazed at how many boxes are used once and that’s it.
@used moving boxes - where I work, we use ‘used’ boxes for our shipping. They are a fraction of the cost, and are usually in almost perfect condition.
Few people buy cardboard boxes and keep them for use later. They’re good for storage but people throw them out. Used boxes are great. Although efficient shipping would be nice, how would a shipping company measure ‘density of boxes’ as well as not deter possible customers?
[…] What happens is that manufacturers pack their packaging to be safe when shipped on a pallet. Look at the Nintendo Wii picture. Nintendo has styrofoam protecting the unit, but this amount of protection is not adequate for shipping the item MORE HERE….. […]
The problem with your suggestion to force companies to ship more efficiently is that they probably ARE shipping as efficiently as they can. The notion that government can come in and regulate companies in this manner is flawed because it presumes that government knows more about this than companies do. When we allow government to stick its hand in stuff like this, it ends up increasing costs for companies, which then pass along those costs to the end consumers . . . which is us.
Whenever the government meddles, it muddles.