Carrier collaboration

A fundamental ambition of the FTC2050 project was to investigate the potential impact of carriers working together to reduce their combined carbon footprint.

Carrier collaboration

In the current climate, where carriers are fierce competitors and all the major carriers deliver everywhere with little collaboration, it’s common to see several parcel carrier vans in the same area at the same time. In principle, it would be more efficient if a single carrier undertook all deliveries within a defined area, adopting a ‘carrier’s carrier’ approach where one carrier employs another as seen, for example, in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (MacLean et al, 2019).

Modelled example:

We modelled the daily delivery activity of five parcel carriers working over a 3.7km² area of central London comprising around 3000 items being delivered to around 900 delivery locations (see map).

Consolidating deliveries and using a single carrier suggested that time, distance and associated vehicle emissions savings of around 60% could be achieved over the business-as-usual operation. This equated to a reduction in the number of delivery vans and drivers needed from 33 to 13, with annual savings of 39,425 hours, 176,324km driven, 52,721kg CO₂ and 56.4kg NOx.

Reliance on vans and associated vehicle emissions could be reduced further by using cargo cycles alongside vans for the last-mile delivery, with estimated annual emissions savings increasing to 72,572kg CO₂ and 77.7kg NOx.

The figure and table below give more details of the results. Consolidation of items for delivery in this way would be especially beneficial to B2C carriers whose parcel profiles comprise relatively small and light items. For more details see our report: Collaborative parcels logistics via the carrier’s carrier operating model or the summary poster.

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