Your statement is very interesting and thought provoking.

I'd like to know if it's true. It sounds like one of those things that are "to good to be true".

Is it possible that you're conflating the total of transportation pollution per capita with the part of it that has to do with driving to the grocery store for that?

Just napkin mathing it, it doesn't seem like it would be surprising in the least due to mass transport.

Take the cargo ship for instance. In looking up the numbers, a single large cargo ship can carry upwards of 20,000 20-foot long cargo containers each with a volume of ~1200 cubic feet. So that's 24 million cubic feet of storage. Break that down into pollution per item, it's going to be some value that's effectively zero.

And the same is going to be true for most other transportation and movement along the overall pipeline, which is all going to be done at a large scale to reduce costs. And then you enter the picture. You drive 15 miles there, and 15 miles back in your vehicle - to pick up 6 limes, a few sprigs of mint, and a bottle of rum. The cost of transport/mile/unit there is easily going to be orders of magnitude greater than any other part of the trip, and it's not hard to imagine it exceeds the entire cost of the rest combined.

15 miles to a store? What kind of people drive that far to pick up so few items? Perhaps doing the big shopping you can go that far, but I definitely buy more stuff than 6 limes when I drive that far.

Also, I wasn't comparing the cost of shipping lime from south america to europe, but I was comparing it with the cost of shipping limie from south america to vietnam to do the packaging and then back to europe to do the consuming which is more than double the pollution. You need to unload the ships, move the trucks to the places where people do the packaging, move the goods back into a ship, unload the stuff again, drive it all the way to other warehouses etc etc

> 15 miles to a store? What kind of people drive that far to pick up so few items? Perhaps doing the big shopping you can go that far, but I definitely buy more stuff than 6 limes when I drive that far.

When you think about it, most populated areas in the US are rural, sparsely populated areas. It may be 20 miles to the nearest store, and that store may only be a 7-11. I feel lucky to have found a nice spot in a rural area that is only 8 miles to the Walmart, and that really hurt recently with gas prices, still does.

> most populated areas in the US are rural

But most population, isn't in rural areas. I've got a local specialty grocery store literally downstairs next to my condo, and a full grocery store three blocks away. "The average household traveled 3.79 miles to their primary grocery, even though the closest store was 2.14 miles way." (https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/04/10/5-things-the-usda-lea...)

I think their point is not that there are people that far away from a store but that those folks generally make larger bulk purchases when they make the trip to and from the store.

People don't realize that bulk purchases require up front capital. Some people can't afford to buy more that what they need at the time, even if it'll cost more in the long run. This even includes things like the 24 or 36 pack of toilet paper

OK but if you are driving 20 miles to buy one roll of toilet paper it probably makes about as much sense to wipe with singles.

The closest grocery store to my house is an upscale store about 10 miles away. Next closest is the much cheaper Walmart which is about 12 miles away in a different direction.

I often have to make a 20 mile round trip just to get a gallon of milk.

A good rule of thumb is. If it's cheap, it didn't burn too much energy! A trip to the store is purely C02 expense of almost a dollar. A dollars worth of lime, probably has C02 expense in the range of almost 10 cents.

This is simply not true. Consumer transportation accounts for a tiny fraction of global energy use. This is a common tactic for blame shifting to excuse the complete lack of effort and egregious waste from the corporate and industrial sectors. Shame on you for blindly picking it up and retransmitting it.

You seem to be changing focus. Op is pointing out that 10k fruit transported has a very low amortized cost per piece, whereas driving to the store has a low number of goods to amortize over.

This was pointed out on a freakanomics episode.

Furthermore last I checked the academic analysis I could find found that Amazon prime delivery has smaller footprint than driving to the store unless you’re getting like 14 items at once for similar reasons.

It also completely discounts the policy decisions that lead to the car being driven. The driver didn't choose to defund public transportation and build widely spaced infrastructure that largely requires car travel.

Shame on you for ignoring the industrial feedback loop that is required to make consumer vehicles.

The building and refueling of gas stations.

Shipping replacement parts.

The trip to the store is not their only impact.

You’re cherry picking a stat that represents the smallest part you want to take responsibility for but demand for all of it as resource costs.