IBM Sustainability Summit 2011

November 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Watching an empty train roll past yesterday morning while I waited to get on my way to a meeting gave me some pause for thought to consider the IBM Summit I attended on Tuesday in central London at 8 Northumberland. Unlike the event last year which was completely focused on transport, this had a wider series of topics being discussed, many linked to getting consumers to be more sustainable. There were a number of breakout sessions and workshops focused on questions around getting people to act in more sustainable ways, and some specifically linked to transport, for which the consensus was that it was crucial to challenge the norm of behaviour.

As with other more general sustainability events, it was a good opportunity to reflect on what we do and what some of the challenges are that we need to consider in overcoming in order to act/ be more sustainable. The key transport breakout session was around the topic of liberalising travel information to help people go greener. This is important, but at the very heart of the matter is the issue of pricing – until sustainability and pricing are linked, then it is going to be difficult to get the behaviour change necessary to really achieve great things with sustainable transport.

This morning, I attended an event put on by the Committee on Climate Change discussing UK shipping emissions, which was particularly interesting in terms of highlighting that transport-related emissions are going to become a greater problem over time as it is left behind energy in priority. It is clear, as they suggested, that this issue does need to be addressed, but it does not come without difficulty. I fear that a key stumbling block will of course relate to getting some form of international consensus on how to deal with this through the International Maritime Organization. It sort of reminded me of a Monty Python short video played on Tuesday by Mark Earls, one of the speakers at the IBM summit (shown below). Fortunately though, as one person highlighted today, it is in the best interests of the shipping community to reduce costs which will hopefully reduce carbon emissions anyway!

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Startups Interviews: Carbon Voyage CEO James Swanston

September 27, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The following was an interview for the magazine Made in Shoreditch with …

James Swanston is the founder of Carbon Voyage, a startup dedicated to finding efficient transportation solutions. Prior to moving to the United Kingdom in 2007, James ran a number of small enterprises in Australia in the wine, property, and IT industries.

As well, James has served as an officer in the Australian and British Armies, including tours of duty in Malaysia, East Timor, Iraq, Falkland Islands and Afghanistan, and was awarded the United States Bronze Star Medal and the Australian Joint Operations Command Commendation for service in Iraq. James holds Bachelor degrees in Law, International Business and Modern Asian Studies, a diploma in Export Management and a Masters in International Relations and Asian Politics.

G: Tell us about your startup, Carbon Voyage

J: Transport is quite inefficient with lots of empty journeys and part loads, which creates unneeded costs, carbon, and congestion. We have built some software that can be used to book and manage transport journeys, and in doing so, find opportunities to share journeys and fill empty return loads. Over the last twelve months, we’ve been working with some fairly big organisations to build our credibility in the marketplace and also ensure that we’ve got our proposition and technology right.

G: What were the biggest obstacles in launching your company, and how did you overcome them?

J: Funding a new business is always a massive challenge. To date, we’ve been fairly fortunate to have been able to do this without any real external investment, although a point will come where we will need to consider this. As the business grows though, this challenge will remain, particularly in terms of managing cash flow.

G: What would you say has been your most memorable moment since launching Carbon Voyage?

J: I guess the most memorable thing is to see the technology when it has first been built. We’ve just finished building some new freight software that we’ve been working on for a very long time, and this is particularly exciting for us.

G: Can you give us a few ‘Do’s and Dont’s’ for setting up a new company?

DO

  • Get your product or service out there and iterate quickly based on customer feedback
  • Look at setting up strong partnerships
  • Keep fixed costs down as much as possible, and be careful about what you spend your money on

DON’T

  • Take your focus off sales and marketing
  • Let obstacles get in your way

G: Why did you choose Shoreditch in launching your startup?

J: Shoreditch is a pretty cool part of London, and it is great to have lots of other startups around you who relate to all the ups and downs of running a business and pursuing your dreams.

G: What does the ‘Silicon Roundabout’ have to do to compete with Silicon Valley?

J: We really need to ensure that the right talent can come to the UK and London to build great startups, and the Government could play an active role doing so.

G: Who/what are your favourite entrepreneurs/startups in Shoreditch?

J: I really like Moo and Tweetdeck, and there is also a great environmental business called AMEE. And of course, there are some great businesses in the Accelerator!

G: What does the future have in store for Shoreditch?

J: I hope it continues to draw in cool start-ups so that there is a vibrant community built up of start-ups form around the world. At the same time, I hope that it doesn’t completely lose the edgy, fun atmosphere that makes Shoreditch a special place.

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Sustainability briefing for freight companies

September 12, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Last week, we run a small session for a number of freight companies that are part of TfL’s Freight Operator Recognition Scheme. We went through some basics of sustainability and the history of how greenhouse gas reporting started through the last 120 years or so, and then onto how companies can improve their reporting as well as understanding about Greenhouse Gas Reporting protocols. The presentation was fairly big, but here is part 1!

CarbonVoyage FORS Sustainability Briefing Part 1

 

 

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Are you a freight company in London?

August 30, 2011 by 2 Comments

We’re running an event on 6 September to help FORS members meet their environmental objectives. If you’re a freight company in London and not a member of FORS (which is run by Transport for London), you should think about joining – for more information, apply here!

Details for FORS Environment Lecture

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Freight and Collaborative Consumption

August 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Back in February, I went along to a great session at NESTA all about Collaborative Consumption, an issue that is closely linked to sustainability – I guess you could say that it is all about sharing assets/ resources which reduces waste and thus cost (and by extension carbon). The underpining concepts of collaborative consumption are just as relevant in freight/ shipping/ logistics as they are for consumers. Empty capacity rates in logistics are significant – up around the 30 – 40% (which I mentioned in my last post) – an interesting example of this is the following diagram taken from Merge Global.

Freight and shipping utilisation rates

While there are certainly external factors that influence this (such as what could potentially be transported on a backhaul), it does not really help the profitability of a freight company. The current economic climate is not particularly helpful as Maersk points out. There are certainly structural inefficiencies which will never allow for perfect utilisiation rates of transport. With an oversupply of freight assets, low profitability and minimal rates of economic growth in major economies, there are some tough times ahead for the industry.

While our focus to date has predominantly been on road freight, it seems that there opportunities for collaborative solutions which are missed. In passenger transport, my favourite example is taxis and airports (particularly Heathrow) where there are millions of empty taxi and minicab journeys each year.

Freight seems to exhibit many similar characteristics, without some of the behaviour change issues that affect making passenger transport more efficient (such as the issue of sharing). Recently, we’ve been working on a location that has many different businesses (eg. a business park or business improvement district or other transport hub) and there has fundamentally been no collaboration between each of the organisations in freight deliveries or collections. What that means is that when courier drops off a package, it often happens as the same time as another courier shows up to pick up a package; or, that there are multiple milk deliveries on a Monday morning from different places. Aside from the basic cost implications, it creates unneeded congestion in an area that has very limted road access. As we look at traffic/ freight patterns in the context of the Olympics, there is of course the option to restrict deliveries to particular times, but this won’t make things more efficient.

Given the impact of cost, congestion and carbon, the only real option (other than not having things delivered or collected) is to look at a more collaborative approach to working with other organisations that share similar needs. There are a number of works/ studies that look at the potential impact of more sustainable transport on cost and carbon, such as one I mentioned over a year ago from the National Geographic. In a report we are doing for a client at present, we are using some of the statistics from the London Freight Plan regarding the impact of carbon and congestion (for this client, cost is not actually the issue). The London Freight Plan suggests that efficiencies in freight could result in 0.61 million tonnes of carbon savings, and that the financial cost of congestion is between £2-£4 billion per annum which is clearly considerable. Previous work that we’ve done, including that with the University of Manchester and Tesco has given us into some of the barriers to behaviour change for people to travel in more sustainable ways, and it will be very interesting to see which of those barriers is also present for freight…

 

 

Filed under Freight, Logistics, Shipping, Sustainability, transport Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sustainable Mobility: Use transport in more efficient ways saving both money and carbon

April 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Sustainable Mobility: Use transport in more efficient ways saving both money and carbon.

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Beating the rise in fuel costs

January 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Ushering in the new year was not just a set of parties and festivities but also increases in public transport costs and fuel (via the fuel duty and the increase in VAT) – The Scotsman referred to it as New Year fuel duty rise leaves lorry drivers facing ‘a £95m hangover’ and The Independent also mentioned that the situation could get worse due to a potential spike in the price of oil – and the price of fuel has gone up 20% in the last two years as highlighted in this BBC article. In The Independent article, the Freight Transport Association was quoted as saying that these price rises would see lorry drivers paying an additional £1,200 per year in fuel costs. The Daily Mail suggests that motorists will need to pay an additional £255 per year to run their cars.

Obviously this is concerning for those who drive and those that provide transport services; however this also needs to be seen in the context of the massive inefficiencies across the transport sector. One of the terrible statistics is single occupancy in vehicles which averages 60% (and 84% for commuting) which is crazy. Price rises could be ‘combated’ by increasing charges to customers, which then just serves to compound the inflationary pressures created by the VAT and fuel duty increases. The better solution is to look at where efficiencies can be generated. Given the scale of inefficiencies within the industry (30-40% empty running/ dead mileage for taxis and road freight), the real answer is to address this which can happen very easily, whether it be driver training, more efficient fuel products or technology solutions that help better match up demand and supply, which is obviously at the core of what our technology does. Continued price rises will also start to change the equation around the cost-benefit of switching to hybrid technology and coupled with the announcement about subsidies to purchase electric vehicles will potentially see some interesting developments in this direction. This is of course accompanied by significant capital expenditure so really the short term solution and the easy wins are around driver training and technology.

I appreciate the concerns that motoring associations and industry commentators have, but the reality is that the transport industry is immensely inefficient and has a massive environmental impact – the way to deal with this is to seriously implement more sustainable ways of travelling and nothing else is good enough.

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Taxis in London – 196,000 tonnes of carbon per annum

October 22, 2010 by 1 Comment

This week we visited the European Future Energy Forum at ExCeL. There were some great presentations about e-mobility and smarter cities from Siemens, but perhaps the most interesting presentation was given by the CEO of the European Climate Foundation, Jules Kortenhorst in a panel discussion on Promoting the Development of Sustainable Fuels for Transport. One of their findings was that a 50% reduction in carbon by 2050 is only possible with zero-carbon road transport. It was good to hear someone highlight this as I often get the view that the only discussion about climate change at the moment is around energy.

Tesla

Tesla at EFEF

In the Eco Transport showcase, there were two very cool Tesla vehicles so thought I should pop a picture in from my trusty iPhone!

But perhaps the most valuable set of statistics were from some posters made by Transport for London. The key one (below) showed that transport in London is responsible for 9.8 million tonnes of carbon each year, or 22% of the total carbon emissions for London. Almost half of that (4.5 million tonnes) comes from cars and motorcycles and the good old taxi industry is responsible for 196,000 tonnes. Given the statistics from the Department for Transport about occupancy rates in cars and our own knowledge of taxi occupancy rates, it is not too difficult to see that if vehicles were used in more efficient ways, you could save over a million tonnes of carbon a year, just in London.

TfL Statistics

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Carbon Voyage meets Peter Jones

July 29, 2010 by 1 Comment

On the 22nd of July, Carbon Voyage was one of six finalists out of around 3,000 entrants in the Enterprise Business Challenge, a competition to pitch to Peter Jones of Dragons’ Den fame.

James Swanston with Peter Jones at the Enterprise Business Challenge

In the week preceding, I went from someone who had never really watched Dragons’ Den to someone who has now pretty much watched every episode in existence. Unfortunately we didn’t win, but it was still a great day (the winner was Funky Lunch which is a great idea to get kids to eat more healthy food)

It was a good day, not just in terms of getting some more pitching experience, but also to meet some of the other finalists and hear about what they are up to.

In other news, we’re working on a really exciting project at the moment which I am hoping will launch later this year up north. There is a very cool article in the National Geographic that is sort of an aspiration what we would like to achieve called ‘A Day with Less Driving’ – check it out!

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The Launch of Tesco Carbon Voyage

June 16, 2010 by 1 Comment

We are launching a ride sharing service called Tesco Carbon Voyage this week in partnership with Tesco and the University of Manchester’s Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI). The service will be operating as a twelve week trial at three of Tesco’s big stores in North West London; if it proves successful, it may be extended. To visit the site, click here. The service will be offered to Tesco Clubcard holders in three Tesco Extra stores in North West London.

This is a really important activity; 84% of all passenger car trips in the United Kingdom only have one occupant according to DfT figures, so any opportunity to increase vehicle occupancy can have a impact on reducing carbon emissions, congestion as well as cost. The service we provide will be great in being able to get a baseline of the impact of customer travel to and from these stores and then identify potential financial and environmental savings.

What we are trying to do here is firstly understand travel patterns to and from supermarkets and then provide Tesco customers with a safe and convenient way to share their trips to and from their stores. The customers of the service will be able to book via phone, text or online. We will capture all the financial and environmental data so customers can find out how much they are saving through the ride-sharing scheme.

At the end of the trial, the SCI will also interview several hundred participants to get a detailed understanding of their views to such a service – what is a good enough incentive to get people to share, what barriers are there and so on. Something that is unique here is that not only are people being surveyed about their travel patterns, but we have the opportunity to see what they actually do. The SCI has also written a short information piece on this trial here.

As a start up, this is a tremendous opportunity to deploy a service on a very large scale and demonstrate the value of what we have to offer, and we’re really pleased to have been selected by these organisations to help them deliver this service.

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