What Green GB Week means for our freight and logistics community

Sarah Wixey, Associate Director based at our London office, shares insight into what’s been happening across the freight and logistics community as we support Green GB Week – a chance to highlight the opportunities clean growth offers the UK and raise understanding of how business and the public can contribute to tackling climate change.

Through Green GB week, there’s been a long list of government and industry announcements and pledges to reduce environmental emissions. This week is a time for celebrating our achievements and encouraging everyone to do more. Here’s a quick roundup of what’s been happening so far in the freight and logistics community.

Monday

Innovate UK and KTN hosted an event to encourage the engineering and manufacturing sectors to work together to develop low carbon solutions for specialist vehicles, including fire engines, ambulances, and construction vehicles. The Government published its response to the Committee on Climate Change’s 2018 Progress Report to Parliament: Reducing UK emissions, which included a new industry-wide voluntary target for reducing HGV greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent by 2025 from 2015 levels.

Tuesday

Fleet Operator Recognition Scheme (FORS) launched its new FORS Standard (version 5.0), which includes several new environmental requirements fleet operators will have to meet to attain a bronze, silver, or gold accreditation level. This is a significant achievement as FORS has 5,000+ accredited members and covers 107,500+ vehicles throughout the UK.

John Lewis & Partners and Waitrose & Partners announced their ambitious plans to switch their heavy delivery trucks from diesel to low-carbon 100% renewable biomethane vehicles by 2028, cutting emissions by a staggering 80 percent. A rollout of 500 new vehicles will be on our roads within the next 10 years, saving an estimated 49,000 tonnes of CO2 every year.

Wednesday

Courier company DPD UK opened its first all-electric last-mile delivery parcel depot in central Westminster. This is one of eight all-electric depots planned for London and the company is looking to achieve an initial reduction of 45 tonnes of CO2 per annum.  The site is serviced by a combination of electric 7.5t eCanter HGVs, Nissan eNV200 vans, and Paxsters micro-vehicles.

All this positive news comes on the back of last week’s reformed Plug-In Car Grant announcement, which has been extended to cover 20 percent of the purchase price, up to the first £5,000 of new electric cargo bikes. The government hopes this will encourage wider take-up of greener vehicles for last mile deliveries.

I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next.

Contact Sarah via E: [email protected].

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