Lawmakers including state Sen. Mike Gianaris are pushing to regulate emissions associated with last-mile deliveries and e-commerce warehouses.
Photo courtesy of State sen. Mike Gianaris/X
New York State and city elected officials joined forces on Tuesday to support a new bill which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with the boom of e-commerce warehouses in New York, and the massive amounts of trucks needed to transport goods from those warehouses.
The bill, called the Clean Deliveries Act, seeks to establish an indirect source review — a kind of environmental review — for some warehouses. The source review would introduce regulations on emissions produced by those warehouses and the trucks that service them, and could also force them to adopt measures that would decrease air pollution.
E-commerce warehouses like those used by Amazon are much larger than traditional warehouses — some spanning upwards of one million square feet — and operate largely on a 24-hour basis during the “last-mile” delivery process, which describes the arduous process of transporting packages from their hubs or warehouses to their final destinations.
Since these warehouses are substantially larger and more abundant than ever, thanks in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, advocates say the amount of pollution and emissions they produce is becoming increasingly harmful to the communities they are in.
In Red Hook, the environmental damage caused by the expansion of e-commerce warehouses is hitting the predominantly Black and brown neighborhood particularly hard. According to a study by Consumer Report conducted in partnership with the Red Hook community, a traffic sensor on one of the neighborhood’s main streets counted nearly 1,000 heavy duty trucks and vans operating on an average work day in the area.
These vehicles, which are largely diesel-operated, emit large volumes of particulate pollutants like nitrogen oxides and volatile…
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