The most difficult and expensive part of a delivery is the final leg known as the ‘last mile’. Transporting parcels together saves fuel and driver time, however dropping off each parcel at its final destination requires an individual journey and accounts for up to half of the total delivery costs.

The Royal Mail’s advantage is its postmen and women who walk the ‘last mile’. Even in rural areas, the high number of deliveries allows it to use ‘park and loop’ that combines driving a delivery van to a neighbourhood with making the final deliveries on foot. Royal Mail calculates that its 90,000 posties walk up to a billion steps a day!

Royal Mail also runs the largest electric delivery fleet with around 5,000 electric vans, and another 2,000 electric models on order for the coming year.

DPD has an electric fleet of over 4,000, a third of its delivery vans, and reports that it hasn’t bought a diesel van since 2020. It estimates that it delivers 26 million parcels a year on electric vehicles.

Amazon has only around 1,000 electric delivery vans on UK roads. Supermarkets have even less despite their green pledges; Tesco leads a poor field with 500 electric vans out of a fleet of over 5,000.

The roll-out of electric delivery vans is strongest in urban areas. EVs are much better suited to stop-start driving and are quieter – an advantage when making evening deliveries on residential streets – and are perfect for clean air zones.

However, the companies themselves may be motivated less by their green credentials and more by the anticipated cost savings due to the lower fuel and maintenance costs of electric vehicles.

Some companies have turned to the use of biodiesel, but unfortunately the hoped-for reduction in carbon emissions is doubtful. These vehicles still have tailpipe emissions of CO2 and other pollutants. Crops grown for biofuel absorb some CO2 when they are growing, but these carbon savings are offset by production and processing emissions. Growing crops for energy is extremely inefficient in both water and land use.

The use of logistics software greatly improves the energy efficiency of deliveries by plotting the most fuel-efficient route for a day’s deliveries and GPS helps drivers to avoid congestion and delays by altering routes in real time.

The question of whether it is greener to use delivery services or to drive yourself to the supermarket or retailer depends on the energy efficiency of the vehicle used, and on how well the delivery service succeeds in combining deliveries, or if shopping in person, whether you combine the shopping trip with other necessary journeys.

An easy way to make our home deliveries greener is to opt for the slowest delivery option available which allows companies to optimise the routing of deliveries. Green delivery slots are designed to maximise this by indicating when a delivery is already scheduled in the area.

Lastly, the purchase that isn’t made has the lowest delivery carbon footprint of all!