A solid piece in The Sunday Times (not something I say often) about the huge energy consumption of high street stores – the super-bright lighting, the OTT heating, and most ridiculously, the insistence on leaving the door open as though they were actually trying to heat up the whole planet.
According to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, retailers use 275 kilowatt hours (kWh) per square metre.
That’s vastly more than, say, local government offices (39kWh), factories (47kWh), warehouses (81kWh) and commercial offices (95kWh).
One explanation for the waste is lighting: many stores are lit to the same intensity as television studios. And now to heaters, the craziest of which must surely be the ones installed over the open front door, which typically have a rating of 500 kilowatts — roughly 17 times as powerful as a domestic fan heater.
Environmentalists say the best way for consumers to tackle retailers’ wasteful emissions would be to stop going to shops altogether and buy everything online. Department for Transport studies show that replacing shoppers in private cars with delivery vehicles would reduce traffic by 70%. And without customers to dazzle and roast in shops, retailers could become wholesalers and reduce utility bills on their premises.
So get clicking next time you need to buy something…!
About
3 Comments