Graduate student Yuan Molly Tian has spent the better part of the academic year studying Stanford’s waste. Specifically, she’s studied package trash and emissions, as well as the emissions produced by the many Amazon, FedEx, UPS, and other trucks delivering packages to campus each day.

Her findings?

Using just the Graduate Package Center’s seven-week data, daily package delivery to Stanford graduate students is equal to 20.5 metric tons CO2 eq, equivalent to 13 round-trip flights between New York and London, per passenger, or the emissions produced by powering a home for 2.7 years.

“This means that assuming the Tresidder Package Center has about the same traffic as the Graduate Package Center and the seven-week data is reflective of what happens year around, the annual emissions would be equivalent to [someone taking] 195 round-trip flights between New York and London,” Tian, a Living Lab fellow at Sustainable Stanford said of her findings.

But a new package delivery process, announced last week in a message to graduate students, will centralize distribution through the new Land, Buildings & Real Estate (LBRE) Mail & Packages Services (MPS) program, which assumed management of package delivery on campus from Residential and Dining Enterprises in September 2024. The MPS program aims to address sustainability concerns and space constraints and is similar to the centralization effort for undergraduates unveiled in 2021 that created a new Mail and Package Delivery Center at Tresidder for students living in undergraduate housing.

With the new system, all student packages will be processed through a centralized receiving warehouse in Newark, California, and then delivered to secure lockers or package centers throughout campus via Stanford-owned vehicles. Given Newark’s prominence as a distribution hub for large retailers like Amazon, this means a reduction in emissions created during the retailer-to-customer delivery process.

“Once we shift to Newark … hopefully retailers like Amazon will only need to send one vehicle from their warehouse to ours versus their warehouse to campus and multiple trucks, so we’ll have package consolidation and a reduction in emissions,” Tian said.

It also means that the number of delivery trucks entering campus each day will be reduced and the use of Stanford-owned vehicles for the final step in delivery will help reduce campus emissions overall, aligning with the university’s target of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

In addition to emissions reduction, the centralized process should help address a growing issue around package waste. Currently, the boxes and shipping materials produced by packages overflow from recycling bins or pile up around residential common areas. But under the new system, students will have access to a central recycling area for packages as well as a space to break down boxes.

According to Tian’s data, package waste has grown from 620 tons in 2023 to 715 tons in 2024, about the weight of 173 adult elephants.

Geophysics PhD student Becca Prentice says the changes are an opportunity for the Stanford community to rethink the impact of having thousands of packages delivered each day to campus.

“I totally get how convenient online shopping is, but when you see the amount of waste from the packaging it makes you wonder – are there ways we can be more sustainable?” Prentice said.

The changes to the package delivery system will be fully implemented in the fall and administrators are hopeful that students will ultimately see a benefit and have an increased sense of the sheer volume of packages processed each day. With better tracking data, in the future it might be possible to set rates to encourage more sustainable approaches by asking users to internalize some of the cost of ordering very high volumes of packages.

“Over the past several years, the number of packages delivered to residences on our campus has reached a staggering volume of more than a half million per year. At the same time, emissions from delivery trucks, trash, and concerns for safety have risen,” Michele Rasmussen, vice provost for student affairs said. “We look forward to a collective decrease in campus truck traffic, reduced trash and emissions, and increased community safety.”