Shrinking our shipping footprint

By far, the greatest contributor to our environmental footprint is the shipping of items between sellers and buyers. In 2015, Etsy sellers shipped tens of millions of items. If you add up the total number of miles those packages traveled, you could go to the moon and back …over 460,000 times.

A closer look at shipping emissions

The Etsy marketplace grew in 2015, and along with it so did our carbon emissions. Our emissions from shipping are up 10% over 2014. However, our emissions per shipment actually decreased. What’s causing that decrease? One contributor is the fact that shipments between a buyer and seller in different countries decreased from 2014 to 2015. Although the biggest contributor to our international GMS comes from cross-border transactions, a key part of our strategy is to build local marketplaces globally by deepening local Etsy communities around the world, each with its own ecosystem of Etsy sellers and Etsy buyers. Cross-border shipments tend to travel greater distances, generating greater emissions, and infact, cross-border shipments on average have almost double the emissions of shipments within a single country. In addition, when buyers did purchase from a seller in another country, the distances these items travelled was shorter in 2015 than in 2014, by 4.3%.

While we expect that the shipment of items between buyers and sellers will continue to grow over time, Etsy is committed to addressing the carbon impacts of this aspect of our business. We aim to tackle this area in a few ways: 1) by supporting a transition to cleaner shipping through dialogue with carriers and peers; 2) by creating tools and resources for our sellers to ship efficiently; and 3) through creative initiatives that engage our marketplace, like the Etsy Solar program we launched in 2016. It will bring the benefits of solar to the sellers in our community, while creating carbon emissions reductions to balance this footprint.

Methodology

We strive to be as accurate and transparent as possible when it comes to our data, but calculating emissions from the variety of ways our sellers ship around the globe in an ongoing challenge. Last year, we revised previous emissions estimates upwards based on both the availability of new data as well as a new and very thoughtful approach to overstating assumptions for unavailable aspects of the calculation. In last year’s Progress Report, we reported our total 2014 emissions at 144,065 metric tons of CO2e. It was a delightfully conservative figure. But through a new partnership with the United States Postal Service (USPS), we now have direct access to rigorous emissions data for all USPS shipments. For packages shipped through other carriers, we use USPS emissions to estimate the impact of these shipments. We feel confident in this approach and in the quality of the USPS data, which is third party peer reviewed. With this new and more accurate data, we’ve significantly revised downward our 2014 emissions and have a high degree of confidence in both this new estimate for 2014 as well as our 2015 shipping emissions estimates.