Mega-warehouses are creeping up on our communities, polluting our air and making our neighborhoods loud, hot, and full of diesel exhaust.
- The online shopping boom, exacerbated by the pandemic, has made e-commerce mega-warehouses pop up closer to where we live, putting our health and climate goals at risk.
- Delivery trucks from these facilities make hundreds, sometimes thousands, of trips per day, generating massive amounts of diesel exhaust, making them the worst polluters on our roads.
- This links directly to asthma in kids, heart disease, cognitive problems, and even early death. Data point: Annually, an estimated 13,500 new pediatric asthma cases are attributable to NO2 pollution — a main pollutant released by diesel trucks.
- Today, 1 in 4 New Yorkers live within a half-mile of a mega-warehouse, but their impacts are not felt equally. Black, Hispanic/Latino, and low-income populations live near warehouses at rates that are more than 59%, 48%, and 42% higher.
The cost of convenience
Almost all of us participate in e-commerce, but the impacts of our actions are invisible to most of us. The communities forced to live with the constant plumes of polluting diesel, however, cannot ignore it.
From Buffalo to Babylon, we all want to breathe clean air, but massive e-commerce corporations are using loopholes and corporate power to operate warehouses that dirty our air and overwhelm our streets with noisy diesel trucks. While companies like Amazon, Walmart, and Target see record profits, their near-constant truck traffic means our residents, especially those in communities of color, face dangerously high levels of pollution and emissions. The industry is entirely unregulated, allowing for unchecked warehouse sprawl.
Warehouses need to be better neighbors.
What We Need Now
A statewide indirect source rule could address emissions associated with mega e-commerce warehouse operations and require qualifying warehouses to report their pollution. Companies would work with the state to create plans to cut their pollution, with a flexible menu of solutions that includes zero-emissions trucks and charging infrastructure equipment, solar panels and storage, air filters in the community and other green alternatives. We need lawmakers to require mega-warehouses to develop emissions and monitoring standards to clean up their operations.