In the United States in particular we have a very vast country and many products being shipped across the country. Many times these trucks are less than loaded (they call it LTL) and the trucks are lucky to get 7mpg. My own rig got around 6 mpg when hauling a load. Then tact on a lot of these products come from overseas.
So by the time the product is delivered to the customer it may have traveled around the earth just for some simple item like fuel. Especially if the product is a foreign product which includes your daily crude oil that is burned and then put into the environment. These products include anything from fuel, electronics goods, plastics, food, tools, automobiles, clothing, you name it - just about everything goes though a long transportation network to where you use it.
Being a futurist I feel in the future many of these problems could be solved and reduced dramatically but only if we make the changes happen. Actually right now things could be dramatically changed if there was an effort to do so. But until we make some changes this inefficient model will be way things are done. This inefficient way of living is at great cost to the environment and waste of resources that could be put to better use for all of society and the planet.
Right now societies waste energy at an astounding rate and along with that energy expenditure comes the certain consequence of mass pollution that not only contaminate the air we breath but the fallout to the soil and the oceans - it's very destructive. It's bad enough the factories put masses of contaminants into the air but that's just the beginning of it. After a product is produced it goes through a long transportation network and then after it's used it is disposed of.
As a former truck driver I've been to a lot of factories in the United States that make you disgusted when you see how pollutive they are without even looking at the data. It's not the literature - you can see the effects and after reading the data you get a full understanding of what's going on. Just driving though the US you see how the face of the environment has been permanently altered by man and the pollution is a constant cycle because of the way we do things as a society - it really is an industrial apocalypse.
Then (as a trucker) after you get the products from the factory and you start to realize (if your a thinker) just how inefficient we are after hauling a product 500 to 3000 miles across land (don't forget if the product came for over seas tack on the distance from country to country - Approximate distance in miles from New York United States to Beijing China is 6875 miles and some of these loads across land portion of the journey are less than loaded).
I've personally hauled many loads that were either 1/4 full of the 53' trailer 2000+ miles and sometimes I've even been paid to run that far empty to get a load from Mexico to haul back imported parts to a Ford plant in Detroit, Michigan or Indiana - these plants looked like dead factories on the US side with skeleton crews. The Ford plant loads were actually a regular route for me - I did them back and forth. I wouldn't be completely empty on the US side but I might as well had been - that is I would haul empty parts bins (empty containers) to go pick up parts at the border in Nogales (a border town) to bring to the Ford factories in the Mideastern states.
The point is the distance traveled to get imported parts totaled ruffly 4000+ miles; that I personally drove and that doesn't even account for the mileage in Mexico (the other driver drove from Mexico) to the border for me to grab a preloaded trailer from him in exchange for my completely empty (parts bin) trailer from the US. That kind of waste is pretty common in the trucking industry.
Sure were "efficient" (fast) at producing the products and bringing them to people but the problem is it comes at a great expense to the environment. You don't even need to look at any data to see this - most thinking people can see the waste that is created and the obvious drawbacks in transporting goods from 1 central location to bring goods throughout the country (or world if it's a major export). It's just a very inefficient system that is very costly to the environment.
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