E-Commerce: Convenience Built on a Mountain of Cardboard

This is an automatic summary, original reduced by 87%.

With each new delivery to his doorstep - sometimes several in a day - he faces the source of his guilt and frustration: another cardboard box.

Postmates, a San Francisco start-up, promises deliveries in less than an hour.

Uber calls its new UberRush service "Your on-demand delivery fleet"; Jet Delivery offers "White glove" service in less than two hours; Instacart can deliver groceries to your door in less than an hour.

Dr. Sperling said that consumers shared as much responsibility for the environmental cost of the deliveries as the companies that provided the speedy services.

Delivery services have immense incentive to find the most efficient routes, keeping their fuel costs and emissions down.

Ardeshi Faghri, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Delaware, said the increase of various emissions - which he estimated at 20 percent from 2001 to 2011 - "Could be due to a multitude of reasons, but we think that online shopping and more delivery trucks are really one of the primary reasons."

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