It might be hard to imagine, but most people didn’t have easy access to goods a century ago. If you were a rural American, you sometimes lived miles – even day-long trips – away from the nearest store. So you relied on mail-order catalogs.
Fortunately for us, we’ve moved into the age of ecommerce. Thanks to the internet, we have access to thousands – even millions – of items. And the best part is it doesn’t take any paper to create a website.
But what if online retail stores suddenly started printing their offerings? How many trees would it take? Would their catalogs trump the mail order catalogs of yesteryear?
To see how much waste popular e-retailers would create if they began printing their own catalogs, we determined the volume of their sites, along with the number of items listed. We then used that information to generate an average physical catalog size.
Curious to see how many trees e-commerce is saving? Check out this ebook for further information!