FedEx Green?
June 10th, 2010 by johnShopping online? Getting your packages shipped to your door. Saves you driving out to the mall and back, and with companies like FedEx making efforts to use greener vehicles and cut fuel consumption, surely having them handle the delivery must be the environmentally sound thing to do (assuming, of course, you really need what you ordered!).
I thought so too. And keeping fuel costs to a minimum not only makes sense for the planet, but should also help FedEx save some money. Then I saw a tracking record for a package that was being shipped to me from a city around 40 miles from my home:
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According to Google Maps, the FedEx Oakland location that the package arrived at last night is 7.5 miles from my home, the package’s destination. Around 6:30am today it left there, and I assumed it would be on one of their delivery trucks heading here. But no, look where they sent it – Memphis, Tennessee!
Somebody at FedEx in Oakland actually loaded a package for delivery to an address less than 10 miles from where they stood on to a plane, and then flew it approximately 1800 miles to their hub in Memphis. At some point today, probably without even considering the stupidity or cost (to the planet and to FedEx) of these actions, another worker at FedEx in Memphis will load the package back on a plane, and send it back to Oakland – another 1800 miles.
So, my little package will have travelled around 3600 extra miles. Nothing green about that, and no matter how fuel efficient your vehicles, this is never going to be the right thing to do.
I actually called FedEx to see whether this was some kind of mistake. Perhaps the web site tracking information was wrong, or perhaps the parcel had accidentally been put in the wrong box. But no, from what the very kind customer service person told me, it seems that it is normal to route packages through their hub in Memphis like this.
Do other shipping companies work this way too?



It goes by a number of names, but essentially what we’re talking about here is power consumed by devices while they’re switched off. How can devices use power when they’re switched off? Well, most modern devices, especially those with remote controls, don’t really switch off – they just go to sleep or stop displaying anything. But they’re still on really – waiting for you to press that “power” button on the remote.




