Direct Fulfillment

This category counts shipping products directly to our customers from our distribution centers, in response to orders from telephone and our web sites.

Direct Fulfillment (Tons CO₂)

Highlights

At 11.3 percent in 2006, shipping products directly to our customers accounted for a disproportionately large percentage of our total greenhouse gas emissions. This is due mainly to requests for next day shipping via air transportation. Our best solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions generated via flights is our retail store pick-up program. Customers that purchase items from REI.com may opt to pick up their items at any store, and not incur any shipping charges. We can then transport the item efficiently in our normal truck delivery and pass the savings on to the customer. GHG emissions are then counted as part of our store delivery in the previous section.

Challenges

While options such as our retail store pick-up program offer a lower cost, lower carbon way for our customers to order products from REI, we still receive many next day delivery orders from customers, especially around the holidays.

Direct Fulfillment CO₂ Reduction

While our report shows a reduction from 2006, we are concerned that this could be a computational anomaly rather than a real reduction. We will be working with transportation providers to establish more reliable metrics in 2008.

Looking Forward

We are considering ways to inform our customers of the greenhouse gas emissions generated by different shipping options in order to help them plan their orders with the least amount of CO2 impact.

Methodology

This category includes fulfillment of customer orders placed through the REI catalog or web sites. The majority of these shipments go through the U.S. Postal Service or carriers such as UPS and FedEx. To compute our CO2 impact, we separated shipments between ground and air transportation.

For ground shipments, we assume a delivery directly from our fulfillment center in Sumner, Wash., to the customer. While this neglects the possible shipment routes to and from the carrier's logistical system, we think it is a fair representation of the distance traveled. To simplify calculations, we have assumed the average shipping distance is 1342 miles (delivery from Sumner, Wash. to Denver). We computed the total CO2 impact based on our average package weight shipped for the average distance and we used the same CO2 factor computed for truck delivery. In 2008 we will have the ability to calculate the actual mileage for each package from zip code to zip code.

For shipments by air, we neglected any ground component because the air impacts are so large that it makes the ground portion negligible. To account for the CO2 per air mile, we used the passenger air travel factor developed by the Climate Neutral Network. However, we adjusted the impact for the average weight of a package compared to a person. This may overstate the impact because cargo transportation is more efficient in terms of pounds per aircraft, but it has the benefit of consistency with our other reported metrics. As our carbon reporting evolves, we continue to seek best practices in carbon footprinting and its methodologies and emissions factors.