Interesting fact: each year, three billion trees are used to make shipping boxes

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Two-thirds of Austrians store online, and hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Cardboard boxes and shipping produce gigatons of CO2.

Online retail continues to grow worldwide. The Covid-19 pandemic has given the sector even more impetus, leading to breathtaking sales records.

Large companies such as Amazon and Alibaba have “monopolized” online shopping and raised consumer expectations by offering instant delivery and free returns, says climate expert Martina Igini from the environmental portal earth.org.

Online retail is also in the fast lane in Austria. However, many sales flow abroad, explains Rainer Will from the Austrian Retail Association. Austrians’ eCommerce spending rose to 10.6 billion euros this year.

Smartphone shopping will be the high flyer in 2024, with a growth of 36 percent. “We expect the positive sales trend to continue in 2025,” says Will.

This year, six million Austrians, or two-thirds of the total population, shopped online. According to Wolfgang Ziniel from KMU Forschung Austria, the top product groups are clothing (2.4 billion euros in sales), electrical appliances (1.3 billion euros), and furniture (0.9 billion euros).

According to Earth.org, global retail e-commerce traffic reached a record 22 billion purchases per month and a staggering turnover equivalent to almost 2.6 trillion euros.

Product packaging contributes massively to the CO2 emissions caused by the production of plastics. Experts criticize production, which pollutes ecosystems and causes enormous waste in landfills.

Shipping goods online can produce up to 400 grams of CO2 per order. According to climate expert Igini, in 2020, shipping and product returns caused 37 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

According to the forest protection organization Canopy, three billion trees are processed into pulp yearly to produce more than 240 million tons of shipping boxes. Still, only 14 percent of the 86 million tons of plastic packaging produced worldwide each year is recycled.

However, shipping is not the only problem: the returns rate has also risen surprisingly sharply this year—to 42%. This means that 2.5 million of the six million Austrians who shop by distance selling have returned the goods they ordered.