In Ireland and the UK, transport is the fastest growing emitter of CO2 and other greenhouse gases and the fastest growing user of energy – this despite 30 years of increasing efficiency in the cars, vans and trucks we use and some of the highest taxes on usage of any activity, in the form of purchase and fuel taxes
Many authentic businesses produce a physical product; many more are services of one sort or another where the delivery takes place in person or in cyberspace. In services, you can choose to email, walk, cycle or take the train
What authentic transport choices does an authentic food, book or clothes company have? If they are responsive, growing companies they will get the goods to their customers as quickly as they reasonably can, going above and beyond the norm in their enthusiasm and energy to promote and deliver what they believe in.
Limiting your customer base to walking or cycling distances is neither practicable, nor profitable. Getting appropriate prices for your produce requires the ability to sell and deliver to as wide a range of customers as you can afford to. This applies in developed countries just as much as in the third world, the difference is our communications are better.
If you make your own deliveries, do you choose an expensive electric van with limited range or make better use of a existing diesel van? For most, making better use of existing diesel vans and trucks is the current sustainable option.
Or if you use a third party to deliver, will that courier and distributor make sustainable choices in the use of their vehicle resources. Even if the company genuinely has that intention, how do they ensure their drivers comply.
Once a vehicle leaves a depot, its manager or owner is effectively blind to its activities, when was the last time you saw:
- A commercial vehicle speeding
- A truck waiting outside a premises with its engine running
- A van simply idling in a lay-by keeping its driver comfortable
The fact is we now have the most energy efficient transport mechanisms in recorded history, yet we waste enormous amounts of energy by our choices in how we use them.
To protect the innocent and comply with data protection law, I’ll use my own transport activities as an example. In the 12 months ending 12 November 2004:
I travelled 19,772 kilometres or just under 12,000 miles
72.21 hours of that was spent at less than 3 miles per hour – effectively idling.
At a manufacturer’s rating of 217 grams of CO2 per kilometre, that’s 4.3 tonnes of CO2 for me alone, this figure is a gross underestimate as its measured under ideal conditions.
How can I justify this, what can I change? Well I need to earn a living, so working from home is one option, but business meetings still require travel.
Changing my travel time has a big impact on the wasted time spent in traffic, reducing it to zero, from an average of 10% per trip.
Changing my car for something smaller would have the biggest impact; reducing my CO2 for the same period by 50%. But I haven’t been able to face up to that choice yet, I like my current car’s image and would prefer to use it less, rather than change it, and if we’re honest that’s what most of us would choose to do.
So that’s me, what of real-life delivery fleets? I’ve worked with the measurement of commercial vehicle activity for the last three years and some of the lessons learnt by my company and our competitors over recent years are startling;
- A major utility company in the UK found it could cut 20% off its fuel bill and reduce the actual number of vehicles it deployed by 15%.
- A large supermarket chain found that its own trucks spent on average 90 minutes waiting outside their own stores each day
- Rental cars are left running for hours waiting to be washed at airport compounds
- A major bank reduced its business mileage by millions of miles, yet increased productivity
This whole area of measurement is called vehicle telematics and if you visit my company’s web-site or those of our competitors you will find many similar examples.
So how do these wastages escape the eye of managers in this age of high-tech and cost efficiency? Well effectively when the vehicles leave their depots, managers are unable to see what they do, unless they go out with a driver or do spot checks, they have no way of knowing what the vehicle is actually doing.
Some of the companies involved above installed telematics systems on their vehicles, effectively a device to automatically report driving time, idling time and speeding. This allowed managers to see wasteful activities and implement change.
Wasteful activities are not always the drivers’ fault. Drivers can’t change the traffic, open a customers’ gates or see where the next closest job is: Making the most of your transport resources is a partnership between customer, company and driver, using the drivers’ road knowledge together with optimisation of the route, timing and paperwork to meet the serviceobjective at the lowest cost and environmental impact.
Big brother solutions go against the grain of the sustainable community, as we tend to believe in the individual and their privacy or freedom to act in the face of big business.
But as my own example shows its all too easy to comfort ourselves with the notion that we don’t have a transport alternative, or we must make that meeting or delivery even though the timing means we’ll hit congestion and queues.
Until I saw that I had spent more than a working week, sitting in traffic. It really hadn’t dawned on me what was happening, and I would consider myself someone interested in the environment and energy efficency, with energy efficient everything, organic foods where possible and recycling to greatest possible extent.
You too can influence the environmental impacts of your transport choices;
Change the timing of that meeting or delivery
Choose an environmentally aware delivery agent; ask if they have ISO14001 or a similar environmental management system, be blunt and ask do they use a tracking system to manage wastage in their day to day activities
Next time you are stuck in traffic, turn off your engine, each start only costs the equivalent of 3 to 7 seconds worth of idling. You can see when the traffic starts to move in plenty of time to restart. Do not try this at the traffic lights; buy a Citroen C3 Stop & Start, Honda IMA or Toyota Prius instead.
For an electric / hybrid equivalent to the Ford Transit see www.electricmercury.com. Several manufacturers including Ford, offer commercial vehicles fuelled by natural gas, LPG and other fuels, which can further contribute to reducing the environmental impact of your transport activities.
If you have a view on this article or want to include transport in your environmental management systems I look forward to hearing from you. In the meantime some useful web-sites
•www.climatecare.org offset your transport impacts
•www.est.org.uk/myfleet for advice on UK Fleet Energy management
•theeastproject.com for Environmental and Sustainable Transport
•www.electricmercury.com for an electric/hybrid van
•www.citroen.co.uk/C3 for Citroen C3, look for Stop & Start in 2005.
•www.ford.co.uk/lpg Ford Transit LPG and other options, Vauxhall and Mercedes amongst others do LPG and CNG vans as well.
Conor Molloy, this article is written in my personal capacity, I currently work with WS2 a leading European vehicle telematics software developer and systems integrator. Conor has previously worked in imaging and the software industry. Conor can be contacted at conorm@grainybits.com and welcomes all opinions on the subject of transport and energy usage.