Nowadays online shopping is a major industry, but is it necessary? Shipping clothes, books, etc, is not needed almost 90% of the time. This quarter amazon made $3.28 billion mainly from their shipping services. Shipping one book all the way from China and wasting the fuel instead of just going to the library to read it, is completely unneeded. It’s a waste of fuel. Instead of ordering pants online, take the bus to Goodwill and get them yourself. This will help eliminate the amount of cars on the road and planes shipping amazon orders from China.

I agree with everything you say but this means that people must use their cars to get to the store if they do not in walking distance. And the buses can cause more pollution than cars do, because of the diesel gas in buses. But I agree that some people in this world can walk themselves to the store instead of wasting the fuel in China.

I agree that online shopping does require lots of fuel and money to ship clothes all over the world. It is much better to go to stores nearby to buy clothing. However, buying clothes from big brand companies still require lots of fuel and energy as most of there items are made in other countries such as China. I agree that it is much better to buy clothes from Goodwill or second hand stores so you don’t contribute to your carbon footprint. I also agree that ordering books (and other things) online can have a big affect on our environment. One option is ebooks, as they help reduce the amount of energy needed to produce books and you will avoid the cost of having to pay for your book with shipping, but the production of these ebooks whether it be ipads, electronic readers, etc. take a lot of energy to produce as well. This being said, I agree that libraries are one of the best places to find and get books. You don’t have to pay money and it doesn’t contribute to your carbon footprint because you are not paying for the production of another book.

I actually disagree with what you are saying. Online shopping is a perfect representation of the capitalist system that we live in. As consumers, we now have millions of products available at the click of our finger. This provides a tremendous boost to the economy and saves us a lot of time doing things. There are several additional things that I disagree with. First of all, shipping materials from other places. Whether you are shopping at the store or online, the products are still coming from the same place. Shopping at a store won't change the fact that carbon is emitted by shipping. While it is true that in areas where online shopping is the primary method of retail, there have been traffic increases (https://www.theguardian.com/environment … e-shopping), meaning more carbon being emitted, this is only a short term problem. The eventual shift from delivery vehicles to drones and other robots will solve this. In addition, I believe that it is unfair to expect us to only shop at Goodwill. While it might be a nice thing to do to buy something  there one time, we should have the freedom to buy what we want where we want it. We have things that we need to do, and online shopping gives us more time to do them. In summary, online shopping is not the problem, but rather technologies that we use to execute it.

Online shopping is very convenient but it is not always good for the environment. A lot of fuel can be used shipping things from place to place and that really pollutes the atmosphere. Instead, you could just walk to your local thrift store and not pollute as much and reduce your carbon footprint.