Oh no! You forgot your dad’s birthday or Mother’s Day, and by the time you remember, it’s the day before! To get your gift there on time, you’ll need overnight shipping, right? That’s true, but see if Dad or Mom will be forgiving if you send them their gifts via ground delivery. Why? Because overnight shipping is so much worse for the environment.

Here are some reasons why.

Extra Packaging

Overnight shipping often involves extra packaging materials. Items intended for next-day delivery need to be in a special box or envelope, and the package is usually padded extensively. Overnight packaging is generally not reusable, having seals that require destroying the packaging to open them. Bleached paper is commonly used to make boxes and envelopes intended for overnight shipping.

Emissions

Airplanes use a lot of fuel, and they produce a lot of emissions. Being so high up in the atmosphere, airplanes deliver their combustion emissions directly into the higher areas of the atmosphere. Currently, airplanes account for only 2% of total global CO2 emissions. By choosing delivery methods besides overnight air, the total can be even lower.

Airplane fuel is expensive, too, which partially explains why overnight shipping costs so much.

Faster Is Not Always Better

You choose overnight shipping because you need something delivered quickly. After all, the essence of next-day delivery is speed, but slowing down a bit would have positive impacts on the environment. Time and again it has been shown that slower speeds save fuel and reduce emissions, whether it’s a truck, car, plane or train.

Greener Choices

In the late 1990s, the United Parcel Service (UPS) conferred with a group called Environmental Defense in order to make its overnight shipping greener. Some of UPS’s changes included a decrease in packaging material overall, greater use of reusable packaging and no bleached paper in any packaging. UPS also increased the use of recycled plastic and paper in its boxes and envelopes.

Making these changes had significant, positive environmental impact, reducing air pollution, waste water, and energy use. These changes also saved the company money, which savings get passed to the consumer. Thus, if you must ship overnight, UPS and companies like them are good choices.

Ground

Generally speaking, ground shipping is the greener choice over air shipping. Ground shipping is slower, but that saves fuel, and the packaging is less extensive. Eco-friendly, reusable packaging is more readily found for packages shipped via ground as well.

Electronic versus Paper

Remember when professionals thought that technology would usher in “the paperless office”? Somehow, that didn’t happen entirely - but that may be due in large part to old habits. Many times, we go for printed documents because it’s what we’ve always done. When possible, send electronic versions of documents. Even greeting cards can be sent electronically.