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The convenience of online shopping coupled with the growth of mobile technology and digital payments has opened new channels of consumption in Africa but has also grown an ecosystem that contributes large amounts of paper and plastic waste and considerable carbon emissions.
The shift away from traditional brick-and-mortar purchases has meant that freight and logistics companies no longer primarily handle bulk deliveries to wholesalers and retailers, but rather deliver direct to consumers, increasing the activity and the number of players focused on the last mile.
Fleets of millions of light commercial vehicles and motorcycles are constantly on the go, making a delivery somewhere in Africa at all hours of the day.
Whether it is electronics goods purchased online or delivery of drugs and food, e-commerce has added to the use of more single-use packaging and increased the number of assets and actors involved in storage and logistics.
While e-commerce in Africa is still largely nascent, governments and businesses need to start looking at the environmental impact of e-commerce and put in place measures that help mitigate its negative effect.
E-commerce companies covers environments characterized by poor urban planning, poor road and energy infrastructure, limited physical addressing plans and regulations that have been in flux.
At the same time, e-commerce is also peaking at a time when there is greater focus by market players on sustainability under environmental, social and governance (EGS) reporting frameworks which ecosystem players can emulate.
Online retail is also being greatly enhanced by different technologies that are helping businesses reach more customers.
Governments – as business enablers, regulators, policy makers and infrastructure providers – need to take the lead in laying down guardrails on the road to a more sustainable e-commerce landscape.
E-commerce has increased the use of single-use packaging. (Source: Image by Freepik)
Some of the areas where change is needed include:
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A lack of proper addressing systems remains a barrier to making e-commerce effective. Many governments are working with urban planners to devise addressing systems that ensure deliveries are made successfully and the number of returns are reduced.
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Governments should support the development of circular economies and reward (via tax breaks, preferential licensing, etc.) players who have workable recycling plans in place and who actively engage with their customers on the need to recycle waste.
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Governments, as operators and owners of utilities, must provide pervasive energy infrastructure that allows industry players to easily adopt electric vehicles for their delivery fleets. Also in this area, subsidies on renewable energy equipment like solar and wind power, would certainly remove some of the barriers to adoption.
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Governments can also make courier and logistics licenses conditional on absorbing and upskilling existing informal couriers, rather than building new fleets from scratch. Such players can enable further technological adoption that would benefit these informal operators.
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Under standards setting agencies, governments should prescribe standards for the minimum use of recycled packaging material and utilize agencies like revenue authorities who are present at points of entry to help enforce compliance.
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Calls to support more local industries cannot be ignored and heeding this will allow more players into the fold and reduce the need to incur global logistics costs for goods that can easily be made locally and sustainably.
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As part of greater environment preservation ambitions, governments should also encourage the use of alternative packaging materials, like those made from banana fiber. This itself addresses post-harvest agricultural waste disposal, helps farmers and does not entail the same chemical process as wood pulp paper manufacturing.
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There should be mandated collaboration with existing logistics networks to reduce the need for building new distribution infrastructure.
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Governments should consider smart city plans that anticipate future logistics needs including addressing systems, environment monitoring, fleet management, smart utilities and smart waste disposal.
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Governments must also look at the waste accruing from e-commerce activities and mandate players put in place collection and recycling mechanisms – and not simply get away with printing vague, unenforceable guidelines about recycling on their packaging. A good way of ensuring this is to include waste management and recycling reporting as part of their license obligations.
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Customs and standards bodies should ensure materials are recyclable and those handling them are responsible for putting in place functional collection and recycling centers.
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Governments should give preferential licensing treatment to courier and logistics players who have high ESG compliance in areas like clean energy use at warehouses and distribution hubs, and delivery using electric vehicles. This can also be phased in to reduce the cost of compliance burden, with key performance indicators (KPI) set against a timeline of compliance milestones.
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Governments should also promote and reward the use of re-usable packaging e.g. cartons, crates and wrapping materials.
Overall, setting up these guardrails now will ensure that when e-commerce adoption increases, there is gradual compliance and less friction in the ecosystem. It will also reduce future needs to police market players and put in place the building blocks for a circular economy to exist alongside e-commerce.
Implementing global best practices
African e-commerce players have a role to play and would do well to emulate global players like Amazon and Alibaba, who have implemented various sustainability measures across their operations.
Amazon has almost halved its use of single-use plastics, in favor of recyclable paper and cardboard, and uses machine learning and automated packing to determine the most efficient packaging size, reducing material wastage.
It has been electrifying its logistics fleet and in 2024, it reported that it had delivered 1.5 billion packages using electric vehicles.
Amazon continues to adopt renewable energy across its warehouses and distribution hubs across 22 markets around the world.
Alibaba is well into a green journey similar to Amazon’s which features setting sustainable packaging guidelines for sellers on its platform.
It has also created customer awareness campaigns, advocating for better environmental choices (e.g. avoid using vendors who supply single use cutlery for food deliveries) as well as highlighting vendors which have adopted sustainable packaging.
In 2024, Alibaba reported an annual reduction in its carbon emissions of 2.3 million tons, representing a 63.5% improvement from 2023. Alibaba aims to attain carbon neutrality by 2030.
When it comes to the data centers that power these global players’ operations, both attained lower than average global power usage effectiveness (PUE) scores of around 1.2 (against the ideal score of 1.0) during 2024.
African players should enforce less stringent delivery windows that allow more efficient use of fleets and preserve ad hoc, delivery on-demand only for essential goods, e.g. medicines and medical equipment.
Alongside more relaxed delivery schedules, local players should also endeavor to adopt route optimization systems to ensure more effective deliveries.
Platform operators should also highlight vendors who sell locally made items of equal or better quality.