Online shopping has reached epic proportions in the United States—and Manhattan is its beating heart. More than 2.4 million packages are delivered to New York City every weekday, and around 90 percent of goods are transported into or around the city by trucks.
While shipping may be free for consumers on many of these orders, these deliveries come with environmental costs. Trucks emit fine particulate matter, also known as PM2.5, and nitrogen oxides, smothering urban areas with harmful pollutants linked to health impacts like childhood asthma, cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and premature death.
In recent years, a number of warehouses have popped up across neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn to help accommodate the fleet of trucks and the goods they carry. Dubbed “last-mile warehouses,” these facilities give companies a place to sort goods before they are transported to their final destination. The city’s commercial and manufacturing districts don’t require permits or environmental reviews for them, leaving communities surrounding them more vulnerable to truck-related pollution.
My colleague Lauren Dalban recently reported on this issue and the community-led advocacy groups working to change how these last-mile facilities are regulated. I asked Lauren—who lives in New York and has seen the impact of these facilities firsthand—to tell me more about the online shopping boom and efforts to minimize its impact on environmental justice communities.
How did you learn about this story?
I learned about this story in the best way possible for any local reporter—by experiencing it myself. I live in a neighborhood called Gowanus, which encompasses industrial zoning and a very polluted canal, as well as some residential buildings. The neighborhood is located between Sunset Park and Red Hook, areas that featured prominently in the story. My apartment window looks onto the Gowanus Expressway, an extension of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which transects Sunset Park and parts of Gowanus.
In the mornings I am often woken up by loud bellows from the gigantic trucks that traverse along the expressway and the roads that feed onto it. Rush hour, especially in the mornings, is the worst. Trucks can accumulate at the entrance and exits of the expressway, often blocking other lanes and creating frustration for drivers—who then punish those of us who live nearby with endless shouting and honking. After the initial annoyance, I became curious where many of these trucks were going, and that’s how I learned about last-mile facilities.
It turns out that, according to this map from the Mayor’s Office for Environmental Justice, I live right next to a last-mile facility.
What’s behind the e-commerce boom, and what makes NYC unique for deliveries?
Though e-commerce has been taking off over the past decade, the COVID-19 pandemic really made it an indispensable facet of many people’s lives. As we have seen with food deliveries, people’s penchant for ordering things online instead of going to the store has not waned with the end of pandemic restrictions.
New York City is unique for these deliveries because, due to the incredibly high price tag on retail space, many businesses have little to no storage space for their inventory. This increases the number of trucks on the road already because they must deliver to these places much more often.
Then, when you take the fact that the city is so densely populated and 80 percent of households are getting a package delivered weekly, the amount of trucks coming in and out of these last-mile facilities is very high. And because they can only be sited in industrial or commercial districts, which number around two dozen in the city, communities near these districts suffer disproportionately.
These communities are rarely even informed when last-mile facilities are built, and there is no complete database of these facilities, though the Last-Mile Coalition and the Mayor’s Office for Environmental Justice have some data on where they are.
How did you report the story? What’s happening now to help regulate last-mile warehouses and the impacts they have on marginalized communities?
I first contacted the Environmental Justice Alliance, who are often my first point of contact for issues concerning environmentally overburdened communities. Then, I was able to get in touch with some leaders of environmental justice groups in the relevant neighborhoods, so that was very helpful, as well as scientists who study air pollution.
It was also very important to speak to the Trucking Association of New York because they know the most about how goods are moving in and out of the city, and what kinds of discussions they are having with warehouse operators.
Smaller initiatives, like the redesign of the city’s truck networks, have widespread support across the board. But more expansive laws like the Advanced Clean Truck Rule have received pushback from the trucking industry.
This rule, which went into effect this year, requires large truck manufacturers to sell an increasing number of zero-emission vehicles in New York. Early last month, state senators from both parties introduced a bill that would delay the enforcement of this regulation until Jan. 1, 2027.
The trucking industry has come out against the clean truck rule because of concerns about the infrastructure to charge them. Electric trucks need specialized charging ports, which have not been deployed in high-enough numbers across the state, making electric delivery complicated, according to the Trucking Association of New York.
Is this happening beyond NYC? What should people keep an eye on moving forward?
The e-commerce boom is a nationwide phenomenon, so New York City communities are not the only ones facing an increase in truck traffic. I think that people should keep an eye on the aforementioned Senate bill, as well as the Trump administration’s attempts to roll back California’s Advanced Clean Truck rule. Massachusetts and Maryland have also both opted to delay their clean truck rules.
The tide seems to be moving slowly away from decisive action on clean truck regulations, and that’s something I would keep an eye out for, especially over the course of the Trump presidency.
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Kiley Price
Reporter
Kiley Price is a reporter at Inside Climate News, with a particular interest in wildlife, ocean health, food systems and climate change. She writes ICN’s “Today’s Climate” newsletter, which covers the most pressing environmental news each week.
She earned her master’s degree in science journalism at New York University, and her bachelor’s degree in biology at Wake Forest University. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Scientific American and more. She is a former Pulitzer Reporting Fellow, during which she spent a month in Thailand covering the intersection between Buddhism and the country’s environmental movement.
