‘Consuming Pre-used Products Curbs Millions Tonne of CO2 Emission in a Year

By promoting re-use of pre-owned items, an e-commerce website has succeeded in directly curbing 6.6 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emission — equivalent to that absorbed by 10.5 million teak trees their lifetime, according to a report by a government-supported environment organisation.

The report by the Centre for Environment Education (CEE), released on Sunday ahead of the World Environment Day (June 5), says OLX India directly curbed this volume of emissions through about ten million transactions across 11 categories of items in 2016-17.

The categories covered include cars, mobile phones, refrigerators, televisions, computers and laptops, sofas, tablets, cameras, books and clothes and in order to quantify the emissions, all stages in their life-cycle, from raw material procurement till it reaches the user, were taken into account.

The OLX-CEE report claims the total transactions of the pre-owned books have saved as much CO2 as produced in 110 round trips between Delhi and Mumbai and of computers did as much as would have been emitted in 19,237 round trips between Delhi and San Francisco.

As much as 500 kg of CO2 emissions were saved each time a used TV was bought or sold and 2,000 kg in buying used cars.

According to the CEE-OLX report, the amount of CO2 emissions curbed is equivalent to that done by the Delhi Metro in 12.5 years.

“This World Environment Day, with its theme ‘Connecting People to Nature’ is a moment when we should realise how nature works in a cyclical way with no waste. OLX, through creating a modern platform for sharing and reusing, is a step in this direction of building a sustainable society,” said CEE Director Kartikeya V. Sarabhai.

“Environment is not the first thing people worry about because the ill-effects are not immediately evident. But let us recall the time a few months ago when people in Delhi and areas in north India were wearing masks, schools were shut, and we were gasping for clean air,” said OLX India CEO Amarjit Singh Batra.

OLX stressed that buying and selling pre-owned items is an easy way to reduce the carbon footprint.

“Every time one uses OLX, the earth becomes a little bit greener. Because every time one buys on OLX, one less item gets produced, lowering CO2 emissions that are suffocating our environment and lungs,” said OLX.