Large retailers don’t have smokestacks, but they generate a lot of pollution − and states are starting to regulate it

• Carriers in the U.S. shipped 64 packages for every American in 2022, so it’s quite possible.
• That commerce reflects the expansion of large-scale retail in recent decades, especially big-box chains like Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Home Depot that sell goods both in stores and online.
• While mail-order commerce is convenient, these centers also have harmful impacts, including traffic congestion and air and water pollution.

Indirect pollution sources

• The company played a prominent role in the 1970s as Congress expanded federal power to regulate air pollution nationwide under the Clean Air Act of 1970.
• To meet those standards, in the mid-1970s lawmakers and regulators considered adopting transportation controls that could address indirect pollution sources – entities that did not generate air pollution themselves but attracted large numbers of sources, such as cars and trucks, that did.
• One of its executives, George Hite, was a leading spokesperson against regulating indirect pollution sources.
• Hite asserted that because shopping centers were one-stop destinations for consumers, they actually reduced air pollution from consumers’ trips.

Big-box boom

• These companies relied on a new type of warehouse: the distribution center, which used computer technology to make supply chains more efficient.
• Compared with earlier warehouses, distribution centers were larger and focused on efficient movement of goods rather than storage.
• In the 1990s, communities across the country began organizing to slow the expansion of big-box stores.
• State and local officials refused to reconsider the deal they had reached with Target, which included grants and other tax subsidies.

Probing retail’s environmental costs

• Target and other retailers are meeting new opposition, including pushback from environmental justice groups, which argue that these companies’ operations increase traffic and degrade air quality.
• In Southern California, the powerful South Coast Air Quality Management District, which regulates regional air quality, has taken this step with Rule 2305.
• This regulation is the first in the U.S. to address emissions generated by trucks traveling to and from large warehouse facilities.
• Point targets are based on each facility’s size, number of truck trips and other factors.

Shopping carts vs. smokestacks

• For example, Target touts investments to make its facilities more energy efficient and place solar panels on its stores and distribution centers.
• Including emissions generated when suppliers shipped these goods to Target’s distribution network more than doubled this figure.
• In my view, the retail sector’s impacts on air, water, waste generation and Earth’s climate call for national-level responses.
• Big-box stores may not look like smoke-belching factories, but their companies’ operations affect the environment in ways that have become too big to ignore.

Johnathan Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.