E-Commerce Logistics: Factoring-In Added Costs for Distribution Fulfillment Centers to Nearby Locations for Online Shopping

Looking down-the-roads ahead, a series of in-the-sky satellite images captures the changing landscape around one airport in California in conjunction with 'dry distribution centers', the development of 'inland ports' and how en-ecommerce hubs are creating additional costs both  to the quality of life and long-range impacts on the environment.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT? You can see as you leave any city nowadays you have this whole strip of warehouses dedicated to online shopping fulfillment,” says Sharon Cullinane, a professor of sustainable logistics at the University of Gothenburg. “You have to have warehouses that are closer and closer to the centers of population so that they can do these half-hour deliveries — it’s a bit mad really.”

Here in Mesa we have two airports that are development areas for increasing speculative industrial investments and commercial/residential construction: Falcon Field in Northeast Mesa and Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport in Southeast Mesa. And then there's Sky Bridge, a planned 'E-Commerce Hub' for exports to Mexico

NOTE: Some city leaders welcome the boom in warehouse jobs. . . many of those jobs are seasonal or temporary and don’t necessarily come with a living wage.)

"You might not see it each time you make a purchase, but online shopping takes up a lot of space in the real world. The number of warehouses built to keep e-commerce running smoothly is growing quickly, and they’re creeping closer to neighborhoods in order to meet consumers’ expectations for quick deliveries.

Online shopping has changed the landscape"

The pandemic isn’t slowing this trend down much. There’s more demand for warehouse space because people are shopping online more. On top of that, some retailers are keeping more inventory on hand because of disruptions to supply chains during the global crisis.

These images taken by satellite show how dramatically online shopping has changed the landscape of one county in California...

atellite images show online shopping’s growing footprint

Warehouses are moving closer to neighborhoods and bringing pollution with them

By Justine Calma@justcalma Nov 25, 2020, 10:53am EST

A lot of the stuff that Americans buy passes through here. The nearby ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach handle about 40 percent of all goods Americans import. Once it gets off a ship, most of that stuff is quickly sent inland to “dry ports,” another term for warehouses and distribution centers that sort packages and send them off to their final destinations.

 

Visual of warehouse development around the San Bernardino airport from 2005 (Left) to 2018 (Right). The Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice has a more interactive map of the warehouses surrounding the airport.

Images: CCAEJ / ESRI

           

The satellite imagery shows the explosive growth of warehouses surrounding the San Bernardino International Airport between 2005 and 2018. On Google Maps, you can see what businesses occupy some of those huge structures: Amazon, PepsiCo, Clorox, Kohl’s, and Mars Petcare (the parent company for well-known pet food brands like Pedigree and Iams). San Bernardino County and neighboring Riverside County together — a region called the Inland Empire — make up one of the biggest logistics and distribution hubs in the US. . .

CCAEJ took these images with the help of geographic information system company Esri to show how this community is in some ways paying for the environmental and health costs of purchases people are making elsewhere. What you can’t see in the photos is the flurry of trucks, trains, and planes taking goods to and from these warehouses. The warehouses are magnets for tailpipe pollution. And San Bernardino County has consistently had the worst smog in the US, according to annual reports from the American Lung Association. . .