Sustainable city logistics on the rise at PostNL
The Hague, 6 June 2019 – PostNL has the ambition to make their deliveries emission-free in 25 city centres by 2025. PostNL has already been delivering business goods emission-free in the city centre of Amsterdam since 2017 thanks to the cooperation with SimplyMile. Both parties have a common objective: making a contribution to a sustainable city. SimplyMile does this by opening hubs together with local partners in large cities. PostNL provides the emission-free business distribution in the cities. PostNL is now further extending this emission-free goods delivery in city centres together with SimplyMile. This year city hubs will be opened in Groningen, The Hague, Maastricht, Utrecht and Nijmegen. It is expected that at least ten cities will be added in 2020. This is a substantial increase in the number of business goods that will be delivered emission-free in Dutch city centres.
Jan van Deudekom, managing director of SimplyMile: ‘We want to make a contribution to cleaner and less crowded city centres. In city hubs at the city periphery we receive goods, store them when required and bundle them. after which PostNL is responsible for the emission-free transport. In this way we can make the goods transport to city centres more sustainable in joint cooperation. The cooperation with PostNL started in 2017 from one city hub in Amsterdam. It is fantastic that we will add five locations this year and in 2020 it is expected that we will add at least ten other locations.’
Rogier Havelaar, managing director of city logistics PostNL: ‘PostNL wants to be the favorite deliverer of the Benelux and lead the way with zero-emission distribution. We committed ourselves to this when we signed the Zero Emission City Logistics Green Deal (ZES). Thanks to the cooperation with SimplyMile we can now also deliver business goods emission-free from city hubs in Groningen, The Hague, Maastricht, Utrecht and Nijmegen. And there are other things which we have planned for 2020 through which we can make a serious contribution to reducing traffic movements and improving the air quality in several cities.’
Making the deliveries emission-free
Both PostNL and SimplyMile have the ambition to make their deliveries emission-free in 25 city centres by 2025. For this purpose, PostNL signed the Zero Emission City Logistics Green Deal together with various government bodies and other businesses. In order to make deliveries in a sustainable and future-proof way PostNL has taken various initiatives. An increasing number of biogas and electric parcel buses leave the parcel sorting centres to deliver consumer parcels in a sustainable way. PostNL uses electric delivery bicycles in eleven cities to deliver business post and parcels. Consumer parcels are delivered emission-free by electric vehicles and small electric vehicles from a central transfer point in the city of Leeuwarden.