The environmental cost of online shopping
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2021
⏱️ ? minutes
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Summary
During the pandemic, online shopping has become more popular than ever. That’s especially true as we head into the holidays. Today, we look at one community that says it’s seeing the costs of that growth in its air quality.
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To meet the increased online shopping demand, companies like Target, Walmart and Amazon use big distribution centers — warehouses that store products and ship things to customers as fast as possible. (We should say here that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
These warehouses can take a toll, though — on Amazon workers, as The Post has reported, and on the community around them.
Today on Post Reports, Kori Suzuki brings us to Fontana, Calif., where a fight over warehouses has consumed the city.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you go up on this one hill in Fontana, you can sort of look out over the city. |
| 0:06.6 | And what you'll see is just like streets and streets of homes, it's kind of like the |
| 0:10.7 | sea of green trees and red triangles. |
| 0:14.4 | But then as you look towards the mountains, those red triangles end and you see these huge, |
| 0:19.8 | white walls emerge from the red and green. |
| 0:22.6 | These are distribution and logistics warehouses. |
| 0:25.7 | And all above the city you can see this haze of air pollution. |
| 0:32.7 | Corey Suzuki is a freelance reporter in California and he's talking about Fontana, a suburb about |
| 0:38.2 | an hour east of Los Angeles, where residents have been fighting over warehouses and air pollution. |
| 0:44.3 | There is no balance. |
| 0:46.0 | All there is now is warehouses and we were okay with the first dozen. |
| 0:51.3 | Now, all we see as a community when we look outside is warehouse, warehouse, warehouse. |
| 0:59.3 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. |
| 1:02.9 | I'm Martine Powers. |
| 1:04.9 | It's Friday, November 12. |
| 1:10.3 | During the pandemic, online shopping has become way more popular. |
| 1:14.4 | A lot of Americans say they just don't feel safe right now shopping in person. |
| 1:18.1 | A growing number of Americans have now turned to the web. |
| 1:21.2 | And then things are about to get even crazier with the holiday shopping season. |
| 1:25.4 | To meet this demand, companies like Target and Walmart and Amazon use these big distribution |
| 1:31.0 | centers, these warehouses where they can store products and ship things to customers as |
| 1:35.2 | fast as possible. |
... |
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