Platform ecology and the environmental repercussions of instant delivery economies

The rise of ultra-rapid, or quick-commerce (q-commerce), delivery platforms, led in India by Zepto, Blinkit, and Swiggy Instamart, has compressed urban grocery logistics into sub-fifteen-minute delivery windows sustained by dense networks of dark stores, gig-labour fleets, and algorithmic dispatching. While existing research has established important environmental consequences of e-commerce and last-mile logistics, and emerging studies have begun to examine the sustainability of quick-commerce, these strands remain fragmented across emissions, packaging, infrastructure, and platform governance. This paper examines how the operational characteristics of India’s q-commerce platforms interact to produce environmental externalities and how these externalities are addressed through corporate and regulatory mechanisms. This paper asks how the operational logics of India’s leading q-commerce platforms generate structural environmental externalities, and what regulatory instruments are required to govern them. Using a triangulated design that integrates systematic secondary-data analysis, qualitative content analysis of corporate sustainability disclosures and regulatory filings, and a comparative multiple-case study of three platforms, the study reconstructs the sector’s environmental footprint and evaluates the platforms’ sustainability claims. It finds that the sector generates an estimated 663,000 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent from delivery operations in FY2025, alongside energy-intensive dark stores, high volumes of poorly recovered composite packaging, and gig-labour-mediated cost externalisation, burdens distributed unequally across income, labour, and generational lines. Absolute environmental throughput continues to grow despite per-order efficiency gains, indicating that voluntary corporate measures cannot resolve the structural tension the paper conceptualises as platform ecology. The paper proposes evidence-based regulatory interventions spanning mandatory audited disclosure, fleet electrification timelines, extended producer responsibility for packaging, dark-store zoning, and algorithmic-transparency requirements, thereby contributing to the emerging literature on the environmental governance of platform economies in the Global South.