Green Logistics

Sustainable ‘take-back’ options

Tom CherrettUniversity of Southampton

Background

• Freight study as part of Winchester’s ‘Town Access Plan’ consultation

• Impacts of ‘core goods’ and ‘service’ vehicles in an urban setting – Winchester High Street businesses (n=83, 69%), West Quay Southampton (n=100, 96%)

Work Activity – Winchester & Southampton

Business managers surveys

Delivery driver surveys

Waste contractor surveys

Returns management

company surveys

Understand retail waste and returns

management strategies

Identify opportunities to reduce transport impacts whilst enhancing material take-back

Consolidated take-back, best practice treatment processes

- 12.7 million tonnes of commercial waste are produced annually. (Envirowise,GG362)

- 48% of commercial waste ends up in landfills.

- Over 50% of the commercial waste is being classified as General Mixed. (Defra).

- Paper and Cardboard account for 20% of commercial waste (Defra)

Retail Waste in the UK

Greener Solutions for take-back

Winchester case Study

Key findings: Take-back

• 41% stated they did not use any back-loading capacity of their main logistics provider/supplier

• 37 vehs/week serving 12 retailers always back-loaded RTN’s

• Service visits to the average business (7.6/week) on top of 5.8 core goods deliveries (13 veh visits/week/business)

• Estimated that for 100 High Street businesses, 245 collections required to collect over 219, 659 litres of residual waste/week (19 contractors)

• 139,007 litres of cardboard (131 roll-cage equivalents) could be produced by all High Street businesses per week) – 15 veh trips (18T rigid)

Joint domestic/commercial collections for SME’s

How could domestic RCV rounds be used to service SME’s?

- Commercial round data for 577 customers around Winchester

- Domestic collection data from 25,586 houses- Use DPS Logix to estimate:

i) Weights of SME waste that could be taken by RCVs

ii) Impacts on RCV round time and distanceiii) Reliability during peak generation periods

Greener Solutions for take-back

• Modelled joint collections reduced vehicle mileage by up to 9.8%

• Joint collection rounds had sufficient spare capacity to allow an additional 35.8T per week to be collected (an additional 690 trade bins/sacks, or around 288 additional trade customers per week.

Greener Solutions for take-back

• Leave ‘core goods deliveries’ alone and address service activity?

• Could retailers employing centralised distribution systems back-load recyclate/returns on behalf of high street neighbours?

• Would 3PL’s/dedicated logistics providers aid take-back logistics by running into out-of-town groupage facilities?

• Would LPs sign up to a back-loading register and be targeted for returns/recyclate removal?

• What could be the benefits of ‘localised’ treatment to reduce the transport footprint?

Contact

Dr T.J. Cherrett

Senior Lecturer

Transportation Research Group

School of Civil Engineering and the Environment

University of Southampton

Highfield, Southampton

SO17 1BJ

Tel: (+44) (0) 23 80594657

Email: tjc3@soton.ac.uk

www.greenlogistics.org