As a nation, we need to plant fully grown nine crore trees today to offset our last mile grocery Co2 load. India is the third Largest Food and Grocery market in the world. We consume worth $570 bn, accounting for 66% of the country’s total retail spend. So that is approximately INR 50 L Crore worth of groceries moving around.
Now let’s assume we consume on a straight-line basis. So every month, we consume around 5 L Cr of groceries. Let’s take our interest only in looking at the fuel burnt in the last mile – the part of the chain from wholesalers/aggregators to the retail store.
On a best-case basis, I reckon that each last mile vehicle ships INR 2 L worth grocery in a day. To deliver 5 L Cr of groceries in a month, we must fulfill INR 17,000 Cr daily. Around 9 lakh vehicles are required daily to meet this demand.
Each truck must travel 50 kms daily to deliver the INR 2 L of groceries. At an average of 12 kilometers to a liter, each truck burns 5 liters of diesel. One liter of diesel corresponds to 2.68kg of CO2. So each day, a delivery auto generates 10 kilograms of CO2 which translates to 3 tons of CO2 in a year. The annual CO2 offsetting rate varies from 21.77 kg CO2/tree to 31.5 kg CO2/tree. So, each truck needs 100 trees to offset the CO2 load.
As a nation, we need to plant fully grown nine crore trees today to offset our grocery Co2 load. And this is still only the only last-mile requirement. We have not computed any upstream good movement in this model.
OR we switch grocery to EV next year and become carbon neutral on the last mile. Frankly, I don’t think the former is even an option. EV fulfilled is healthier than organic grocery. Let’s stop looking at health in the narrow commercial definition marketers want us to.
