E-commerce reduces the environmental impact of shopping by using about a third less energy than traditional retail–but only if you skip the express airmail.

A study out Tuesday by the Carnegie Mellon Green Design Institute offers a scientifically rigorous estimate of e-commerce’s green benefits. E-commerce not only uses less energy, but its carbon footprint is also a third smaller than bricks-and-mortar retail, the scientists found.

Lead researcher H. Scott Matthews and his team compared the energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions required to deliver a small flash drive to a shopper via a trip to a traditional store versus buying and shipping the flash drive via Buy.com.

Coming up with these calculations required many assumptions by the scientists–but they’re a lot more informed than past attempts to account for the environmental benefits of e-commerce, say the researchers. That’s because the e-commerce site Buy.com made available to them information about its data center, last mile delivery practices and other sources of energy consumption. (Buy.com is a member of the Green Design Institute’s Corporate Consortium, but didn’t pay for or direct the study.)

The scientists found that by far the largest environmental cost of traditional shopping is a consumer driving his or her own car to a store. (They assumed that the average person drives about 14 miles round-trip per shopping outing, and buys about three different items on one trip.)

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Over the past few weeks there has been a flurry of reappraisals of the Long Tail, most of which center around the question of whether it creates bigger blockbusters or smaller ones (more concentrated markets or less concentrated ones).

My predictions have always been that massive increase in variety plus massive improvements in “filters” (tools to make it easier to find new stuff that’s right for you) would tend to reduce the blockbuster effect and redistribute attention over a wider range. And, indeed, that’s what the data I cited in my book showed, where online markets of books, DVDs and music saw between 20 and 40 percent of the demand shift to products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores.

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