NOT much happens around my father-in-law's house. But if you spend any part of a day on the front porch, you'll find the rural Vermont quiet occasionally broken.

Just beyond the front meadow, you might spy a little brown truck zipping along. The UPS man. Then the DHL van. And almost certainly later, FedEx. Up and down they go along the road in the middle of nowhere. There are no shops, no offices, around.

I thought about that traffic recently, after meeting a young student in Washington who told me she did all her grocery shopping online.

In the United States, Asia and Europe, more and more of our shopping comes to us in brown boxes, instead of brown shopping bags that we haul home from the mall.

Sometimes the trucks on my father-in-law's country lane turn into our driveway, too. In fact, they often do. Last summer, they brought a stock pot I bought through Amazon. Since then, more trucks have come up that driveway, bringing books, clothes, shoes - you name it.

We all know what to thank for this. Online shopping. In the US alone, Internet retailing came to US$175 billion (S$240 billion) last year, according to Forrester Research. The United States Census projects it will rise to US$271 billion by 2011. That amounts to a lot of shipping.

Although shopping by phone has been available for decades, you couldn't see that bookcase you wanted that way. Or see what it'd look like with three or four shelves, or in walnut or dark cherry. Nothing beats the Internet for almost being there, when 'there' could be a thousand miles away.

So shopping - and renting movies - has become easier, and more efficient. You don't need to get in your car or on the train and head for the mall or shops. But is it really more efficient? I'm not sure.

It takes a lot of energy to deliver those purchases. It took litres and litres of jet and truck fuel to get that stock pot to me. Normally, it would have travelled from the factory to a distributor to a store near me, and I'd pick it up when I went shopping for other things. One trip would end up with a load of shopping. And with fuel prices where they are today, there's an even greater incentive to bunch up shopping.

But when I bought my pot over the Internet, it had to travel all over the US to me (it came from California). I can picture a lot of pots, ladles and baking tins flying around North America and then zipping along on UPS trucks.

So the 'energy intensity' of each item you buy on the Internet must be higher than if you shopped the conventional way. And that's not to mention the energy that goes into making shipping boxes and packing material.

And when shoppers live in places like along my father- in-law's country lane, it costs even more to deliver something like a cooking pot because of all those lonely miles the delivery man must drive. It's better, but not necessarily very much better, in the suburbs where most people live.

Either way, a lot of fuel goes into getting 'new economy' shopping to consumers. Now, goods carriers in the US are seeing volume growth in online-shopping shipments rising faster than for business shipments. Online-shopping packages typically hold few items, while business shipments tend to be more substantial. This surely puts an extra burden on fuel costs against the benefits to the economy of selling things like cooking pots.

So it's best not to get caught up with the hype over the efficiency of online shopping. Instead, think about the effects of e-commerce on the demand for fuel and the environment. Certainly, online shopping opens up choices. But this comes at a price.

Next time I need a pot, I'll settle for something at the local kitchen supplier. And I'll make sure I have a shopping list before I go. Sometimes, getting into a car makes sense.

tionkwa@sph.com.sg

The writer is currently a Bernard Schwartz fellow with the Asia Society in the US.