![]() ![]() ‘If you look at the cars and trucks that are already on the road, most of them are half empty. ![]() ‘Sustainability is what we focus on the most,’ said Tafjord. ‘We are a matching platform that connects senders with what we call bringers,’ said Jon Martin Tafjord, Nimber’s CEO. The Norway-based firm’s idea is to connect people who want to send an item to a particular location with people who are already going that way. One firm that might make a difference sooner is Nimber. Image credit - HadasBandel/Wikimedia, licenced under CC BY-SA 4.0 One company, Flytrex, uses drones to deliver parcels, which are lowered to the ground on a wire. But many solutions like this need further development and face regulatory hurdles. These would reduce congestion and emissions, assuming they are powered on electricity generated from renewables. Or there’s Eliport, a Spanish start-up that is developing dog-sized autonomous delivery robots that trundle around cities at walking speed delivering packages. It flies drones to a person’s home that then lower a package on a wire from 24 metres in the air. Take Flytrex, a company that delivers packages by unconventional means in Reykjavik, Iceland. Some of the proposed solutions sound quite futuristic. A 2018 report from DPD, Europe’s second biggest delivery firm, says that 10% of online shoppers returned their last order. Part of the problem is that plenty of deliveries either fail because the customer is not in or get returned, adding extra mileage. ‘It’s a major source of pollution, so in the context of climate change we need to do something about this,’ she said. Georgia Ayfantopoulou at the Hellenic Institute of transport in Thessaloniki, Greece, says that between 20% and 30% of a city’s carbon dioxide emissions come from last-mile deliveries. In 2009, 36% of people in the EU had bought something online in the past 12 months, but by 2019 that had risen to 63%.Īnd delivery vehicles create a lot of greenhouse gas. Online shopping still accounts for a fraction of all retail spending below 20% in many developed countries. Here the packages’ routes split like the branches of a tree and make their way to many individual front doors, usually carried by a vast fleet of vans. It’s this last section of the logistics, known as the ‘last mile’, that is so troublesome. At some point, though, your shirt will have to be packaged up and carried directly to you. Your shirt will have probably have travelled by ship along with thousands of tonnes of other goods and then been carried by truck with many other articles of clothing to a warehouse. ![]() You find one online and order it for delivery the next day. ![]()
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