“If we want to meet EU societal challenges on decarbonisation in an affordable way and strengthen competitiveness of European industry at the same time, we need a transformational change in freight transport and logistics to make a better use of assets, infrastructure, vehicles and resources”
The deployment of greener and cleaner freight vehicles, trains, barges, ships, and airplanes as well as low emission energy solutions is forecasted to be too slow to deliver on the European Commission’s climate change targets. In parallel to the development of lower and zero tailpipe emission vehicles and low emission energy, it is critical to leverage opportunities for increased logistics efficiency. We envision large gains and benefits to all stakeholders by doing more with less in the freight and transport industry. The existing idle capacity of assets in all modes of transport and storage could be better utilised, and flows could be managed in a more consolidated way using and combining transport modes and other logistics assets smartly. Open and interconnected logistics services and networks (building the Physical Internet - PI) will maximise the capacity utilisation meeting current and future demands. Value creation through efficiency should be used to speed up the transition to greener and cleaner assets, instead of price reductions and margin erosion resulting from the use of current assets.
There are large opportunities for efficiency gains in freight transport and logistics through better use of assets, such as trucks, railways, warehouses and barges and reducing fragmentation, which stifles innovation. a) We know that 24% of goods vehicle kms in the EU are running empty and when carrying a load, vehicles are typically only 57% loaded as a percentage of maximum gross weight. The total cost burden this inefficiency generates is estimated as €160 billion and 1.3% of EU27 CO2 footprint. b) Transport infrastructure is poorly utilised, especially in the rail sector. While the intensity of use of road infrastructure was 25.3 Million-Ton Kilometre per Network Kilometre, rail was 1.7 in 2009.
One source of solutions to these challenges is the Physical Internet. Moving to “Physical Internet Model” could: shift 50% of goods transport from road to rail, cut costs by 32%, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60%.
SENSE Strategic Objective is to accelerate the path towards the Physical Internet, so advanced pilot implementations of the Physical Internet concept are well functioning and extended in industry practice by 2030, and hence contributing to a 30 % reduction in congestion, emissions and energy consumption.
