A green way to keep on trucking

A family in Oregon recently embarked on an unusual experiment. Using the package-flow technology developed by United Parcel Service Inc., the global transportation company, the family saved $3.69 a day on fuel – almost $1,000 over the course of the year.

When such savings are translated to UPS’ fleet of almost 92,000 cars, vans, tractors and motorcycles, the results satisfy not only finance executives but also those trying to cut the company’s emissions.

While e-commerce is a fact of life, goods bought in the virtual world still have to be moved around using old-world, physical transportation systems. And with rising oil prices and growing fears over climate change, transport – once considered a necessary evil by retailers and shippers – is now the focus of attention.

Many look to alternative fuels and hybrid-electric vehicles. But information technology has an important role in making existing vehicles more efficient, particularly when it comes to aggregating small gains across large fleets.

Take something as simple as reducing left-hand turns. For drivers, this means less time idling in the middle of the road waiting for oncoming traffic to pass.

“Left-hand turns – that’s a huge issue,” says Cyndi Brandt, product manager for the Roadnet transportation suite.

A division of UPS, Roadnet sells software that logistics managers at companies such as Pepsi and Anheuser-Busch use to re-engineer their fleet routing.

Roadnet uses an underlying map database that can penalize or disable left-hand turns in the route planning process. The system is well suited to the delivery business because drivers can run circular routes, ending up where they started.

Using this technique, Roadnet customers generate surprising savings on fuel and emissions. Collectively, Roadnet clients save an estimated 54.4 million gallons of fuel a year and can cut about 85,000 trucks and cars out of their logistics systems.

“One customer in Florida parked two of its trucks, and then grew by 20% but didn’t put those trucks back on the road until year four,” Brandt says.

When it comes to transport emissions, the spotlight is now on aviation. Again, technology provides part of the answer. Because aircraft are at their most fuel-efficient at cruise altitude, reducing the time spent circling at lower levels substantially cuts emissions.

Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast technology (developed by UPS Aviation Technologies, now part of Garmin International) uses a global positioning system to determine a plane’s position and enables pilots to space out their aircraft more efficiently during landing.

Aircraft can use a continuous descent approach while flying in idle mode, cutting emissions by 3% between cruise altitude and the runway, and by 34% below 3,000 feet.

“You imagine a three-degree slope from 35,000 feet down to a sea-level airport, and you don’t use any power on the airplane till you get 10 miles from the runway,” says Karen Lee, a senior 747 captain at UPS. “The savings on fuel, noise and emissions are pretty incredible.”

Technology also is helping retailers and logistics providers cut back on wasted “backhaul,” when vehicles, having delivered goods, return to base with no cargo. In Europe, 1 in 3 vehicles runs empty, according to some estimates.

Online freight brokerages can link companies that have backhaul space with shippers that need their goods transported.

“Fleet owners are looking to fill some of their backhauls, so they publish their capacity, availability and timing,” says Greg Aimi, director of supply chain research at AMR Research.

“So the network has visibility to the carriers hauling freight today that will free up tomorrow afternoon.”

Some believe that the real potential, when it comes to cutting the freight industry’s carbon emissions, lies in determining whether shippers should be using trucks at all if other modes of transport, such as rail, are available. In emissions terms, water and rail transport are the most efficient, and trucks and planes are the heaviest polluters.

Deploying different modes of transport was what Malcolm Mclean, the “father of containerization,” had in mind when he came up with a uniform steel box that could be transferred seamlessly between ships, trucks and trains.

But global businesses have since embraced just-in-time delivery – which some say works against fuel efficiency and carbon emissions reduction.

Because speed and low inventories are what count in just-in-time delivery, manufacturers ship goods only when retailers need them – often in small, daily shipments. This requires extensive fleets of partially full vans, rather than a smaller number of fully loaded, larger trucks running weekly.

“What they’re trading off is inventory versus oil,” says Larry Lapide, head of research at MIT’s center for transportation and logistics. “Just-in-time is one of those concepts that makes sense while oil is cheap, but it doesn’t make sense when oil is expensive.”

Demand for timely manufacturing has also limited the amount of freight transport traveling “intermodally,” using several modes of transport. Retailers like the speed and flexibility of trucks using direct routes to the shop or distribution center, rather than the complex business of connecting their shipments with more carbon-efficient trains or ships.

Getting cargo back onto these different modes of transport is the idea behind research being conducted by academics at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Delaware.

“We’re interested in the energy and environmental impacts of freight transport as a whole,” says Rochester’s James Winebrake.

Winebrake and his team are developing a computer model that would create commercial freight routes in the way that MapQuest or Google Maps plot directions for motorists.

“But we’re saying: ‘I want to go from point A to point B in the least carbon-heavy fashion, or emitting the least particulate matter,’ ” Winebrake says. “We also evaluate the least cost and least time of delivery routes and make those trade-offs – because it’s all about trade-offs.”

Researchers working on Gift – the geographic intermodal freight transport model – have laboriously input detailed data about roads, railways, waterways and ports. So far the project has mapped out most of the eastern seaboard.

With time and resources, Winebrake says, Gift could be applied on a global basis. “So if you want to move sneakers from Hong Kong to New York City you could see the least carbon-intensive way of doing that. Our long-term goal is to have that in place.”