Can we “Reuse” Transport?

As with “reduce” - we should look at both the packaging and the transport itself.

Packaging Reuse

In terms of transport, we immediately think of reuse in terms of the packaging that our stuff is nestled in en route to us. In in the shipping of consumer goods for the product line made by my company we manage to salvage enough packing material from incoming goods to pack all of our outgoing packages. The actual packaging is more problematic. We want to present a smart and consistent appearance to our customers so reusing cardboard boxes that were obviously printed for another product and have had parcel tape

Transport Reuse

Is there such a thing as “Reuse” of transport? We've already addressed (above) the need to “reuse” the overheads (vehicles, drivers, packaging) - by treating it as “using less of each overhead per item delivered” so we can't double-count that approach here. However, there is another elephant in the room. Transport companies have a term: “back-haul”.

“Back-haul” is the return journey that the transport overheads (vehicle, driver, containers etc.) have to make once they've delivered their load. It has always been a challenge to avoid travelling home with an empty truck but became even more of an issue when you also had to bring back the expensive and heavy container that held the goods. There have been two key approaches to minimising this otherwise wasted effort:

• Find something to carry on the return journey. It need not be profitable enough to justify the whole return trip, it just needs to make a positive contribution to the overall trip. This leads to desirably outcomes that may originally seem counter-intuitive. Here there can be cases where increasing the amount of travel (more tonne-miles) can actually make sense. It may even make sense to move stuff at no cost if doing so allows a beneficial process to occur that would not otherwise be justified.
• Plan your routes carefully. Don't just consider a simple out and back. Look at round trips. The extreme example of this is probably the global container routes with ships continually circling the world in one direction. This was an attempt (not entirely successful) to exploit specific trade routes where the direction of goods flowing was unbalanced.

We should also note a key problem inherent in both of these concepts - though particularly problematic in the latter. The more complex the route and variety of cargoes, the more prone the journey is to disruption and the less predictable it becomes. Predictability is a crucial factor in exploiting transport to cut costs through “just in time” delivery. A customer is not going to be very understanding when his time critical consignment is delayed by a secondary cargo not having been ready to load on an earlier leg of a journey.

Another problem with more complex routes is that they are rarely direct and every additional stop adds to the distance and time taken for all the items on board. This is why the largest container ships only make three or four stops on a round the world voyage - and use smaller “feeder” vessels to bring cargo to these massive ports such as Rotterdam, Singapore, Los Angeles and New Jersey.

Key Opportunities

It is blindingly obvious that if a vehicle is going to deliver something to a house, we should ask “what could it take away on the same trip?”. The answers are pretty obvious - though there are challenges associated with realising each.

1. In the morning, when our milk, papers and (at least in the “good old days”) post are delivered, we have a pressing need to get ourselves to work and our kids to school.
2. Any time - we don't really care as long as we don't have to be there - if someone was delivering groceries or internet shopping it would be great if they could empty the bin, take away the recycling, take my suit to the cleaners, these letters to the post-box, give my aged parents a lift to the shops etc. It would actually be terrific if the bins and recycling could be taken most days as (a) the contents wouldn't go off or get thrown around the garden by the foxes when the bin overflows (b) we could use much smaller bins and waste less space in our gardens and yards.
3. In the afternoon/evening we'd love someone to bring our kids and ourselves home again. While they were here they could pick up anything from the above list they missed during the day.

Action Required

In a nutshell, the above opportunities can be addressed very effectively by:

• combining collections with deliveries
• mixing people and “stuff” on the same journey - in varying proportions

There's nothing new in this. The railways did it for decades on the branch lines - where trains often ran with both goods wagons and passenger carriages. This works well on short-haul routes with a limited number of stops and where express delivery is not the primary concern.

So the lessons are:

• don't travel empty if you could be carrying anything at all useful
• keep the route efficient with minimum wasted miles
• design for the unexpected. Be flexible enough to work around delays with individual items, breakdowns, sudden surges or lulls in demand, adverse weather and so on.