Reducing the impact of shipments: how to make logistics sustainable

Online commerce keeps growing and that means thousands of packages are delivered every day in any city, which delivery companies have to do with vans.

Online commerce keeps growing and that means thousands of packages are delivered every day in any city, which delivery companies have to do with vans.

In other words, this means that a large number of vehicles are driving around cities during the day, something that is not sustainable and has a high environmental impact.

One of the measures that reduce the negative effect of shipments is the use of eco-friendly vehicles in what is known as last mile, the route the package takes from the local transport agency to the customer's home.

Eco-friendly vehicles can be used here, such as electric vans, which, although they are not as useful for long distances, do make more sense for short ones, where they can be put to greater use.

It is common to find a small package in a large cardboard box, with the entire interior filled with packaging material.

If all this cardboard is not recycled, excessive use of it is generated, with everything that entails. To avoid this, companies should choose cardboard boxes of a size appropriate to the package to be sent, as well as replacing it with paper whenever possible, that is, when the item they protect is not fragile.

Although cardboard is fully recyclable, when it comes to reducing environmental impact there is nothing better than stopping using anything that is not necessary.

In the age of immediacy, many people want to receive their packages or online orders almost on the same day they place the order. There is also the fact that more and more people know this is not the most suitable for the environment, so they are willing for their purchases not to arrive on the same day in order to do their bit for sustainability.

In this way, the possibility can be introduced for customers who buy products online to choose this way of receiving what they have bought, or even to go in person to a pickup point, such as Punto Pack.

Partly for environmental reasons and especially in order to make things easy for both customers and online stores, what is called shipments to pickup points have emerged.

Couriers take packages to certain points that can be street lockers or shops (Lockers) or to neighborhood stores such as copy shops, furniture stores, computer stores, stationery shops, which are known as Punto Pack.

A single professional delivers dozens of packages at once, which avoids having to drive around the city from home to home, thus saving fuel and a lot of CO₂ that is not emitted this way.

That is what we do at InPost, where our drivers deliver more packages in fewer stops, something that a courier going door to door needs more than a week to do, not to mention that our vehicles are never empty, making the most of every trip they make.