Filed under: Shopping Guide

Lament all you want, purists, but a pretty significant huge chunk of the gifts exchanged this year won't come in gift wrapped packages. Instead, they'll come in the form of plastic cards that represent credits stored in a database somewhere.

Sure, to the untrained eye, your pile of Christmas goodies may look like a boring stack of envelopes, but you know what it really is: An after Christmas shopping spree waiting to happen. And when you total up all of the gift card-generated shopping bonanzas all across the globe, you get a pretty major shopping footprint -- perhaps even larger than (gasp) Black Friday.

So it stands to reason that if worked to keep your Christmas shopping eco-friendly this year, you might as well do the same with your post-Christmas bonanza. Unfortunately for people who love shopping bags and long checkout lines, that means doing your shopping online.

That's right, according to research conducted by sustainability consulting firm MindClick SGM, online purchases produce far less emissions than a purchase made at a bricks and mortar store. In fact, MindClick found that items purchased in a store represents 15 times the emissions as the same product purchased online.

According to the study, if you happened to be among the millions of Americans cramming into shop-o-plexes on Black Friday, your purchases resulted in 50 times the negative environmental impact than than they would have if you bought them on Cyber Monday! While that's great news for geeks, it's disturbing for green shoppers that prefer to actually examine the goods in person before swiping their gift cards.

Of course, the online vs. in-store debate is far from settled. While this study makes a pretty clear case for spending you gift cards online, there are a number of assumptions made by the study that don't necessarily translate.

For example, the calculations made the assumption that all of the deliveries would be made by the USPS, or that other packaged delivery services had a carbon footprint similar to the USPS -- probably not the case. The study also neglected to take into account the packaging involved in the shipping process.

Still, even with study's oversights, it looks like shopping online is going to come out ahead, even if you ride your bike to the store and bring your own reusable shopping bag.

Is it Greener to Spend Those Gift Cards Online or in the Store? originally appeared on Green Daily on Fri, 25 Dec 2009 15:00:00 EST . Please see our terms for use of feeds.

 

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