The concept of ‘sustainable retail development’ implies that retail centres should serve their communities economically and socially, while not degrading local environments. However, existing evidence shows that shopping malls often negatively impact both the core and peripheries of city regions from environmental, social, and economic perspectives. This paper adapts commuting data to estimate the hypothetical shopping-related emissions associated with travelling to-and-from retail centres. We perform this analysis at the Small Area level for Ireland’s five major city regions. Our results suggest that the environmental degradation from retail centres increases as distances from urban cores increase.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.