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Reducing carbon emissions from collaborative distribution: a case study of urban express in China

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Abstract

The booming development of e-commerce has brought about rapid growth in the express delivery industry in China. However, urban express distribution is increasingly difficult and seriously affecting the traffic, safety, and environmental conditions of cities due to small, scattered end points, unreasonable allocation of resources, and seriously repeated resource waste. Therefore, there is an urgent need to solve the problems associated with the unreasonable resource allocation of express distribution. In the context of green logistics, a new mode of collaborative distribution based on intelligent end service station (IESS) is proposed. Following the measurement models of carbon emissions, before and after collaborative distributions are provided to prove the environmental benefits of the new mode. The influencing factors considered in the models are the average daily distribution volume, number of distribution sections, vehicle ownership of various types, and their capacity, use, fuel, and power consumption. To verify the models’ validity, we conduct an empirical study of five express enterprises in China and make a comparative analysis on the results, which show that the implementation of collaborative distribution can extremely reduce carbon emissions and improve the overall load rate of vehicles. Specially, the use of new energy vehicles can contribute significantly to energy conservation and emissions reduction.

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Funding

This research was funded by the Fundamental Research Funds of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, grant number 2018XKJC07 and National Development and Reform Commission, grant number JM-19-3-4.

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Author notes

  1. Kexin Bi and Mengke Yang contributed equally and should be regarded as co-first authors.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Automation, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Kexin Bi, Mengke Yang, Xiaoguang Zhou & Yufei Zhu

  2. Department of Business Administration, Gomal University DIKhan, Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistan

    Latif Zahid

  3. School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Zhongyuan Sun

Authors
  1. Kexin Bi
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  2. Mengke Yang
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  3. Xiaoguang Zhou
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  4. Latif Zahid
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  5. Yufei Zhu
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  6. Zhongyuan Sun
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Correspondence to Mengke Yang.

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Bi, K., Yang, M., Zhou, X. et al. Reducing carbon emissions from collaborative distribution: a case study of urban express in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 27, 16215–16230 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-08143-2

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