Responsible consumption and its relation to logistics

Changes in consumer habits in recent years have been strongly related to the unstoppable advance of technology, the alteration in purchasing trends resulting from the pandemic of covid and the rise of ecommerce, among many other causes. All these circumstances have led to a considerable change in logistics and last-mile and home delivery options.

Responsible consumption is the idea that people should adapt their consumption habits, adapting them to their existing obligations and those of the planet, choosing solutions that benefit the environment and collective justice.

It is important to encourage responsible product consumption habits for three main reasons:

The Logistics and Transport sector is responsible for 25% of the planet’s pollution, according to data from the European Environment Agency. As logistics is already considered a sector of primary need, it is everyone’s responsibility to make a responsible consumption of both orders by the consumer and shipments by logistics operators. In addition, with the rise of e-commerce, this responsibility must be much greater since the trend of online shopping will continue to grow and shipments can become very polluting for the environment.

In recent years with the global pandemic, the disruption in the way we work and government life-support economies, consumer trends have accelerated beyond what many thought possible.

Increased health and environmental awareness led even more people to want to consume responsibly. At the same time, confinements and telecommuting led to an explosion of online shopping for everything from clothing to food. According to estimates by Ecommerce News Europe, the continent’s ecommerce would amount to a value of €717 billion by the end of 2020, an increase of 12.7% over 2019. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans spent 32.4% more on ecommerce in 2020 than in 2019. With all this growth came increased demand for fast and sustainable deliveries.

This conjunction of factors has brought consumers to the forefront of supply chain logistics, previously primarily a business-to-consumer (B2C) industry. It has also posed a challenge for logistics companies and their customers (e.g., retailers and manufacturers) concerned about their bottom line. How can they look for ways to be environmentally responsible – reducing CO2 emissions and waste, creating local employment – while meeting B2B and B2C demands for fast and sustainable deliveries, keeping costs to a minimum?

The questions become even more complex when you consider the complications in dense urban environments, where delivery vehicles of all types already account for 20% of urban traffic and are responsible for 30% of urban pollution. Space and time constraints add to the challenges of cities, which are creating regulatory frameworks for freight mobility. This is why finding new solutions has become an essential task.

Among the logistics solutions, particularly to address last-mile challenges, are dark stores. These are smaller warehouses in or near cities whose sole purpose is the fulfillment of online and telephone orders. Alternatives to home delivery are also coming to the fore. Portable lockers for order pickup and delivery, as well as distribution microhubs and click & collect, are becoming increasingly common around the world.

One of FM Logistic’s initiatives is city corners, automated pickup and delivery points in city centers. They are used for everything from fresh and frozen foods to bulky packages. These FM Logistic city corners are not only for reasons of consumer convenience, they can also reduce traffic, noise and pollution thanks to shared resources. In addition, they also create new jobs in the city and develop the circular economy.

These ideas coincide with other major changes in logistics, spearheaded by the growth of the omnichannel approach to retailing: the use of multiple, seamlessly connected platforms to reach consumers and meet their needs while improving efficiency.

From a logistics standpoint, omni-channel logistics solutions offer opportunities to generate efficiencies that span entire industries, even among competing customers, enabling better use of warehousing, transportation and co-packing, while reducing other types of waste. This increased consumer visibility for the logistics sector leads to increased accountability. Data tracking and transparency will become key factors in both recognizing efficiencies and raising sustainability awareness among consumers, trade partners and public authorities. In the sum of all these efforts, from omni-channel to last-mile solutions, the logistics sector is moving from the background to the forefront, with the opportunity to lead the kind of sustainable development that respects the environment and consumers who want to shop responsibly.

Logistic

As mentioned above, road freight transport is responsible for 25% of CO2 emissions in Europe. Air transport is also responsible for 2% of global air pollution. That is why the logistics sector must be very aware and bet on alternative fuels that benefit the environment in order to decarbonize transport operations.

Travel by private individuals (automobiles)

If we take into account that there are more than 30 million vehicles registered in Spain, 65% of which are more than 10 years old, we can imagine how polluting private trips are. The average emissions of a vehicle in Spain in 2021 was 124 grams of CO2 per 100 kilometers. These are very worrying data that create the need to transform the current fleet of polluting vehicles for other types of vehicles with greener fuels. But, at present, electric, hybrid or hydrogen vehicles have a very high price that most people cannot afford. Other examples of responsible consumption would be car sharing and encouraging the use of public transport.

Fast Fashion

Fashion is responsible for 20% of the world’s wastewater. Dyeing clothes in colors means using chemical materials that later end up in the water and are harmful to all flora and fauna.

More and more people are buying clothes compulsively, getting clothes that even if they last a lifetime, they only wear them a couple of times. Nowadays there is a lot of textile offer and there are garments at very low cost so it is attractive to buy unnecessary clothes for mere pleasure. There is a worrying fact that 40% of the clothes we have in our closet are never worn. The customization of clothes, buying the necessary items and knowing their origin and manufacture are actions for responsible consumption.

Industry (food, construction, energy)

The industrial sector is another of the most polluting sectors, which can cause 20% of atmospheric pollution. In terms of food, it is important to try to consume local food to avoid as much as possible the environmental costs of transportation and to avoid, as far as possible, the toxic discharges that we pour on the land in order to make crops grow and ripen. On the other hand, it is important to bet on renewable energies to produce clean and sustainable energy. Spain, with the amount of sunshine it has, could become a world power in renewable energies and become energy independent. Similarly, in construction we must avoid different materials that can be harmful to people and the ecosystem, as is the example of asbestos, a construction material that was banned for causing cancer in people who inhaled it.