SUCCESS (Sustainable Urban Consolidation CentrES for ConStruction) is one of the few projects focusing on improving freight transport for the construction sector, and more specifically on:
- The construction supply chain, collecting real data from four pilot construction sites and analysing them in order to measure the potential advantages of the adoption of new practices.
- The Construction Consolidation Centres (CCCs), measuring their potential impact and finding a viable business model for their replication in other contexts.
There are already a number of projects related to the reduction of logistic flows in urban areas, yet, few of them address construction. Also, the real world implementations of CCCs are very rare. The existing pilot studies demonstrated positive effects. Yet, they were implemented in specific contexts and their general commercial viability was not demonstrated.
SUCCESS is important for society because freight transport is a key issue for our urban communities: transport in the final link of the logistics chain is clearly visible to the population and it accounts for approximately 20% of the overall cost of transport while representing 1% of distance covered. EC Studies show that the construction industry accounts today for 40% of the EU’s total energy consumption, which produces about 35% of all greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, construction is an industry sector scarcely affected by innovation, so the room for improvement is wide. Since 1995 the global average value-added per hour has grown at around a quarter of the rate in manufacturing. According to McKinsey, no industry has done worse.
The concentration of population in urban areas is causing an increase in construction works within cities. This in turn leads to an increase of trips related to construction. These often originate from far away and have huge negative externalities (congestion, air pollution, noise, accidents, etc.). SUCCESS aimed at better understanding the construction-related supply chain and its negative externalities, in order to reduce them.
Specifically, the project aimed to:
1. Decrease the nuisances caused by urban freight transport, so to improve the overall quality of life in urban zones.
2. Improve the use of the existing transport infrastructures and diminish their degradation, so to decrease building and renovating costs and impacts on urban environment.
4. Increase the level of cooperation and coordination among all the stakeholders of the supply chain and the policy makers.
5. Develop reusable methods and tools which can be adopted for the optimisation of the supply chain of future construction projects and help the implementation of CCCs, with clear indications of their impact, suggestions on where to optimally locate them, and a Cost-Benefit Analysis.
