We all love a deal, and Black Friday offers a pretty thrifty opportunity to bag a bargain and cross off all your lucky recipients on your Christmas list in one fell swoop. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year across the world, with lots of retailers vying for customer attentions.
In fact, the US Postal Service anticipates making an astonishing 850 MILLION deliveries between Thanksgiving & New Year’s Day (25th Nov – 1st Dec), shipping a whopping 15% of the entire YEAR’s worth of deliveries in just over a month. This too is rising, with around 10% more deliveries anticipated this year than last!
The environmental impact of Black Friday
The increase in emissions generated by Black Friday is huge – it’s difficult to even estimate the number. The high number of destinations for delivery combined with the unpredictability of customer orders and the increasing demand for speedy delivery also results in trucks that are less than full making multiple trips. All this means even more pollution! All these emissions include greenhouse gases, responsible for global heating, as well as a whole other range of other pollutants which have harmful health impacts.
What can we do?
Delivery companies need to switch to electric and other zero-emission vehicles in order to reduce their emissions greatly. Unfortunately, although electric fleets are really promising for cleaning up the impact of shipping, they’re very expensive. The up-front cost of switching out a fleet of trucks almost certainly requires government funding – something our governments are notoriously bad at!
But don’t worry, there other ways we can help. Tree planting has a mind-blowing ability to consume carbon, helping tackle the climate crisis and improve our air quality.
How does tree planting help?
The climate crisis is caused by heat from the Earth bring trapped in the atmosphere due to high levels of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping gases – often known as the ‘greenhouse effect’. Trees help by removing CO2 during photosynthesis and returning oxygen back into the atmosphere as a byproduct. Young trees absorb around 13 pounds of CO2 each year and at their most productive stage, around 10 years old, they can absorb 48 pounds of CO2 a year. At that rate, they even release enough oxygen back into the atmosphere to support two human beings!
How EcoVibe are helping
At EcoVibe, we want to reduce our impact on the environment as much as possible and hope to encourage mindful shopping. Unlike other retailers, our prices will not change over the Black Friday season. Instead, we’re promising that for every order we receive we will plant a tree, free of charge, on your behalf. In doing this, you can be sure you’re taking conscientious steps to reduce you carbon, not only for Christmas but for years to come.
We’ll be planting our trees through the Trillion Trees Campaign. These trees will be planted across the world, in places such as Indonesia, Nepal and Madagascar, helping communities suffering from extreme poverty resulting from deforestation and destruction of the land that sustains them.
Final thoughts
We’re so excited by this project and we’re thrilled you can be a part of it with us. Our gifts are already eco-friendly, sustainable and plastic-free where possible and we also offer products from carbon-neutral companies. We really appreciate you purchasing your Christmas gifts with us, so we’re really happy to be able to give something back and help the Earth at the same time.