Tom Hayes got in touch last week to let us know about an event coming up next week for Clean air day which is june the 20th. The event details are here with some great speakers. 

Urgent action is needed across all levels of government and business to clean Britain’s toxic air and decarbonise our energy. The opportunity and benefits of moving to clean energy can help us tackle the dangers of polluted air that contributes to thousands of premature deaths.

 

This event is very much up our street to be involved with from a local business perspective but from a personal one, everything that worries me about toxic air was recently on channel 4 via dispatches, you can watch it here - Britains toxic air scandal

There is a better way and it drives myself and the teams vision for Pedal & Post which is to "deliver goods and freight in a sustainable way" with air pollution being a core part of this as well as congestion, inactive lifestyles, road safety, noise pollution and well, cycling makes you happy! what better way to make things sustainable than enjoy it

"Transport is responsible for a huge chunk of the UK's carbon emissions and the levels are actually increasing," Muna Suleiman from Friends of the Earth says. Delivery companies are a significant part of this"

Most of us shop online now and a lot of the carbon footprint of a parcel comes from the transportation process, with the last mile taking up the most energy, which is the final stretch from a distribution center to a parcels destination, think dirty diesel van arriving usually at your home or office. 

We specialise in delivering "The last mile" as we use zero emission, purly muscle powered cargo bikes to deliver in the greenest way possible to your home or office. You may of seen our fleet of cargo bikes whizzing around Oxford or had your parcel delivered by us! but we go further than this, our office for instance is 100% solar powered charging our IT equipment and handsets making our deliveries possible. We want to make zero emission delivery methods and practises become the norm as this has a huge impact on the air quality for Oxford. We saved an estimated 24 tons of co2 last year and we want to keep building on this huge reduction. 

We are now looking to electrify our fleet of cargo bikes and introduce more e-cargo trikes however these have 1.4kwh batteries that need charging (the battery is 40* smaller than an EV so requires a lot less electricity) .

So how do we do this, whilst meeting our vision? We have a plan to invest in two batteries per bike whilst hugely scaling up our solar generation at our depot so we can have one battery being charged by the sun through the day and one in use making deliveries which we can swap around at the end of each day.

This means our deliveries are quite literally powered by the sun! we believe this is the future of logistics and in reducing air pollution and decarbonising to a zero emission future as fast as possible to avoid unnecessary deaths from air pollution and the imminent climate catastrophe we all must face together. 

This panel discussion, supported by Oxford Friends of the Earth, opens its doors at 7pm and starts at 7.30pm, we look forward to seeing you there

Sources:

BBC - How green is your parcel
Metro - The carbon footprint of deliveries