Carbon emissions from urban takeaway delivery in China
Yiqiang Zhong, Shenghui Cui, Xuemei Bai, Wei Shang, Wei Huang, Lingxuan Liu, Shouyang Wang, Rongxuan Zhu, Yuanxiao Zhai, Zhang Yin
Abstract
Online food delivery has become a popular mode of urban food consumption in China as its underlying business mechanism, Online To Offline (O2O), gaining popularity. However, the environmental impacts of a rapidly expanding online food delivery industry and its potential to mitigate environmental burdens remained unexplored in China. Our research found that Chinese cities generated 1.67 MtCO 2 -equivalent (CO 2 e) from 13.07 billion times of deliveries in 2019, including transport and packaging. The transportation-related GHG emissions were 745 KtCO 2 e in 2019, with an average of 0.057 kg CO 2 e per order and an average of 0.011 kg CO 2 e per capita. These emissions have surged from 0.31 MtCO 2 e in 2014 to 2.74 MtCO 2 e in 2021. We predict that this figure will increase further to 5.94 MtCO 2 e by 2035. However, with a range of policies such as replacing motorcycles with electric bikes and optimizing traffic routes, it is possible to mitigate such GHG emissions by 4.39–10.97 MtCO 2 e between 2023 and 2035. These findings highlight the need for further research into the environmental impact of online food delivery and the potential for mitigating it.