Seven major brands are to combine their deliveries to retailers in the Belgian city of Antwerp in an attempt to reduce their emissions by 25% through the Collaborative Urban Logistics & Transport (CULT) scheme.

Danone, Delhaize, Jacobs Douwe Egberts, Pro-Duo, Proximus, Telenet and Schoenen Torfs are working with CULT and hope that other brands will join the middle-mile delivery operations to further reduce emissions in the city.

Under the scheme, national postal operator bpost is to take the goods into the city and for final mile delivery, is to use zero-emissions vehicles. For pallet deliveries bpost is to use HVO (Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil) to power the vehicles, but has promised to switch to EVs for these runs as the technology becomes available.

“This project is fully in line with our Ecozone philosophy of sustainable, innovative urban distribution whereby we combine emission-free delivery with an extensive network of collection points and lockers. It is therefore logical that bpost makes its contribution to this. Our ambition is to be the most sustainable e-commerce logistics player in Europe by 2030, with a CO2-free last mile,” says Dirk Tirez, CEO of bpost.

CULT estimates that a quarter of the previous truck-miles driven by the seven members will be cut out altogether by amalgamating their delivery runs. Test runs have shown emissions fell by a factor of ten.

“The more companies bundle their flows in CULT, the fewer transport movements and emissions compared with the situation in which companies operate individually. After all, five deliveries per street is much more sustainable and efficient than one delivery every five streets,” says initiator and CEO of CULT coordinator TRI-VIZOR, Alex Van Breedam. “And by aligning the goods flows of the companies better – say, making the bundling smarter – a lot of kilometres and emissions can be saved.”