[bryanlarsen]

From the article:

"Of course, shipping meal kits to millions of households causes emissions. But these kits are delivered alongside other mail on normal routes, and the researchers found that this last stage of distribution accounted for 11% of grocery store meal emissions but only 4% for meal kits."

[jjeaff]

By that logic, only that one letter at the very end of the delivery route is responsible for any of the co2 emissions from package delivery. Everything else is just along for the ride, since they were going by anyway.

[SilasX]

Bingo! This is one of my pet peeves!

If you want to accurately measure the cost of sending a package (or passenger, or data packet), for any reasonable purpose, you can't use the "just one more" test. You have to say, "what if I increased the load by a million units? Okay, the unit cost should be regarded as a millionth of that."

Here's a great application of the concept when Netflix tried to use the "just one more" model: [1]

>The green marketing gurus at Netflix go even further, arguing that the mail is going to be delivered to your house anyway, so the environmental cost of delivering one of their DVDs is effectively zero. ... Here, the Green Lantern feels Netflix may be overplaying its hand just a little: Eventually, the addition of new mail into the system adds up, requiring more trucks, greater strain on the mail-sorting system, and so on. Since we can’t identify the impact of one extra piece of mail, we’re better off averaging the cost of delivering the mail over each item.

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2008/08/is-your-netflix-queue-d...

It was discussed on HN too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=414173

[thatoneuser]

Isn't there just some average value floating around out there to estimate the cost of an ounce-mile of mail?

At any rate, your food gets shipped from same place and ends up with you. Isn't the co2 going to be basically the same if that's to a grocery store first or to a big cooking joint? Assuming the locations are roughly similar.

[perl4ever]

I think you are being uncharitable - is there any reason to think they are using the specious logic you are imputing? The fact that the truck already has a route with a lot of packages means the emissions are lower even when you count the meal kits proportionally. And they didn't count the emissions as zero, right?

[jjeaff]

I've learned to never be charitable when it comes to corporate/marketing speak.