The PrimeTruckers

Post date: Apr 2, 2011 6:51:26 PM

For this assignment, we were tasked with creating the most environmentally unfriendly product or service we could think of. That led our group (Vishnu Anantha, Michelle Guarino, and Jason Wilkins) into a brainstorm session around how we could reach as many people as possible using an existing infrastructure. We settled on creating a product distributed through Amazon.com, specifically Amazon's Prime service. As Vishnu had done some work regarding the environmental footprint of vehicles in the past, we decided that would be a good option (specifically a truck). But how could we really amplify just how bad this PrimeTruck could be for the environment?

We decided that our gift truck would be a "thank you" to all of our loyal prime customers out there. We will off.er you this single passenger truck that can be used once with special fuel BP made specifically for our truck. Additionally, this truck is an experience. It arrives on an even larger truck, the one and only:

Custom PrimeDeliverTruck that delivers the PrimeTrucks. So when it does finally arrive you will be SUPER PUMPED because of the build up. Your PrimeTruck arrives in style inside a paper-mulch box that has been printed with the maximum colors available at the pre-press (because we love you that much). And when you’re done using your PrimeTruck, our one and only custom PrimeDisposalTruck will come by and pick it up. So by the time the disposal truck finally arrives you will have had plenty of time to say goodbye!

The truck also features an amazing limited edition V12 Engine with 5mpg! The engine uses special high octane fuel with 2x the oil content and tetraethyl lead. It has even already been pre-filled and can travel 25mi! It’s one passenger seat so that you don’t have to share! The special packaging with metallic ink. Since it’s promotional we don’t have to follow Auto Market Rules (so we can do what we’d like!). We are only making 606 so sign-up and spend $10 today to ensure you get yours!

We used Carnegie Mellon's Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Analysis tool to calculate just how large of a carbon footprint our PrimeTruck service would be. We considered light duty and heavy duty truck manufacturing (PrimeTruck and delivery trucks), packaging, truck usage emissions, Amazon HQ footprint, and disposal (see attached flow chart). Using the EIO-LCA tool and some simple math we were able to estimate that our CO2 emissions would be about 84219878 lbs of CO2, which is equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of a small American town (approx. 2000 people). We think we did a great job of creating a product and service that would have a negative environmental impact at every step of its lifecycle.