Ecommerce Supply Chain Sustainability

I want to talk to you guys about the supply chain of e-commerce because I've said here as a metaphor it's like the wild west, but that's because it's really fast-growing. There is a huge amount of money being spent in that industry. It's very innovative but it's very much underregulated. There are no controls in place for this industry, and people are making a lot of money in this space. So, that's why I think it's like the Wild West. It's sprung up overnight and become a very big industry, and there's a lot of opportunity. I know you guys are all studying supply chain and logistics, and from my perspective, this particular area of supply chain, especially within the UK and Europe, is a huge opportunity to get involved in an industry when it's forming, when there's still a lot of inefficiency and opportunity to improve. Some of the skill sets you're learning right now are very applicable to this industry, which is why I wanted to talk about it.

 

So, you stole my thunder a bit and told everyone who I was. So, hi, I'm Josh. I'm the managing director over at Priory Direct. I studied sports science at Aberystwyth University, so I didn't expect to be in this industry and doing what I'm doing now. I'm really interested in sustainability, social consciousness, which is the ability to act as a group of people for the benefit of a group of people. I think it's something we are missing quite a lot at the minute. And I really like packaging, unsurprisingly, because it's the industry that I'm in. And I believe that businesses can be a power for good, and that's something I'm really passionate about achieving with Priory as well. Outside of work, I like rock climbing, kite surfing, and sailing. I spend a lot of time outside, and I think that's why focusing on sustainability is natural for me. I think we all benefit a lot from the world we live in, and looking after it is something that should be very important to a lot of us in my view.

 

So, we've introduced Priory Direct already, but effectively, we're a packaging retailer. We supply 21,000 businesses, and our mission is to take that platform and use it to help minimize the environmental impact of e-commerce. And we also have some fantastic partnerships with charities. I believe all businesses should be triple bottom line, which is good for people, good for the planet, and good for the economy. And for us, within our last 12 months, we've raised £40,000 for our charity partners, we've protected over five million square meters of rainforest, and we've helped over 6,000 retailers directly reduce the carbon footprint of their operations. So, we're really, really proud of that. And we also did over £3 million worth of fully climate-neutral packaging as well, which is a really fast-growing sector and it's very interesting to retailers who are trying to reduce their footprint both materially and through how it interfaces with the supply chain. So, that's Priory Direct and me.

 

Now, I've told you whenever you talk to people, you should tell them what you're going to say. So, my plan is to introduce myself, which I've done, to introduce Priory Direct, to tell you what I'm going to say, and I'm going to ask you if you've got any questions at the end. You've got an opportunity to speak with someone who's actively in this industry now. If anything about your career path or anything I talk about today is something you want to ask about, then write it down and we can discuss it at the end. And if you're too shy to do that, then I've got my email address at the end and you're really welcome to reach out to me. I can happily give you some time. Part of those charity partnerships is volunteering, and everyone at Priory gets two days paid volunteering a year. And that's why I'm here now because this is my volunteering time to come and speak to people, share information and knowledge, and hopefully inspire you guys to see that there are some really engaging challenges for you to work on in this industry if that's where you're heading with your degree.

 

So, what I'm going to talk about is how big is the UK e-commerce market? What is the e-commerce supply chain? How do those goods get to us? Is it all sustainable? And what opportunities are there to improve? And then, like I say, a little bit of a chance to ask some questions.

 

So, I'd like to run an independent survey on how big the e-commerce market is in the UK. So, can everyone put their hand up, please, and keep it up until I knock you out with a question? So, if you put your hands up for me, can you put your hand down if you've ordered online today? Okay, within the last week, have any of you ordered online? Within the last month? Within the last six months? Okay, so six months is quite good. That's quite unusual to get that far through. But the truth is that in the last year, in 2021, 82% of the UK population have ordered at least one product online. So, a lot of those people, especially during the pandemic, etc., are first-time ordering online, and that market adoption rate is growing quite quickly.

 

How big does that mean in terms of numbers? It's really big, and it's surprising to even me, I think, how large that market is. So, this is from the Office for National Statistics, and the total turnover for sales via website or over electronic document interchange for 2019 was £693 billion. £693 billion of online retail in the UK in 2019. So, e-commerce isn't a new thing anymore. It's a very, very big industry, and moving those goods around is a really significant challenge.

 

It's continuing to grow. I don't know if you guys remember what happened in 2020, but it was a very strange year, and we saw very, very high year-on-year growth for e-commerce in 2020. Obviously, the pandemic restricted a lot of people's movement, and online shopping became the backbone of a large amount of goods being able to reach consumers, and that adoption really spiked the levels of annual year-on-year growth. And actually, what we've seen is the new ceiling is higher than it was pre-pandemic. So, I have another question for you guys, which is: we're talking about £693 billion worth of retail revenue. So, what percentage of retail do you think e-commerce represents in the UK right now?

 

Anyone think it is more than 60 percent? Yeah, a couple of nods. All right, anyone think it's less than 30 percent? I think you might be a little bit surprised. So, actually, this is a headline. The amount of e-commerce revenue that, in terms of its share of retail, peaked in the pandemic at 38%, and right now, e-commerce only represents 26% of total UK retail. So, it might surprise you guys quite how big the retail industry in the UK is. We're talking about a number of £693 billion being just 26% of that market.

 

So, that's about the size of the market, and the one sort of final, fairly frightening statistic I think is what people expect that market to do next, which is to continue growing. And this is a number called a compound annual growth rate, which I'm sure you guys will have seen before. And the expected compound annual growth of e-commerce to 2027 is 21% every year. Okay, so they're predicting a revenue through online sales of £3.3 trillion by 2027.

This is why I'm calling it The Wild West because it's getting big so quickly. It's the land of opportunity. There are so many people investing an awful lot in this space, and that means that the sustainability of e-commerce and supply chain is a massive, massive priority. If this growth trajectory happens and we don't make the delivery associated with e-commerce more efficient and more sustainable, we're going to have a really, really big problem. Okay, so it's big, it's growing very quickly, and it's set to continue growing.

 

So, how do the goods get to us in the e-commerce supply chain? Most of you will have received goods online. Hopefully, all the ones that put their hands up to say they had ordered online have received some goods. So, there's a specific sector that I would like to focus on, which is called courier express and parcels, the set market. Okay, this is data for the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. Now, France and Spain are in there because they're reasonably large adopters of e-commerce within Europe, but the truth is, and something that most of us aren't aware of, is that the UK is very far in advance in terms of its adoption of e-commerce. E-commerce in Europe really isn't as predominant as it is in the UK. So again, all of the challenges that we're going to talk about in the UK are just about to start becoming big challenges in Europe, and there's an awful lot of sustainability challenges associated.

 

So, that online retail actually converts to 4.4 billion parcels that flowed through e-commerce in 2022. 4.4 billion is the prediction. That's 12 million parcels a day. Okay, now these numbers, I think they're really hard to wrap your head around. I don't know what 12 million of anything looks like, but 12 million parcels a day is the average flow of parcels from online retail in the UK. That's projected to grow at nine percent per year until 2027. So, we're looking at 42% growth to 6.2 billion parcels by 2022. That's 17 million parcels a day. Okay, so if nothing else, what I'm hoping to impress at this moment in time is that there is an awful lot of goods moving around because of e-commerce, and the footprint associated with that is likely to be very, very high. The shipping industry in itself is 17.1 billion just for courier express and parcels, and that's set to grow to 21.8. That's the prediction. Incidentally, I should dwell on it as well, that France is 1.8 billion parcels set to grow to 2.9, and Spain is 0.95 of a billion set to grow to 1.53. So, they're showing fast growth rates, but they're significantly smaller markets than the UK.

 

So, the next thing I wanted to talk about was just how that split of delivery is between the different services that you guys might be aware of. So, in the UK, predominantly standard delivery, so 3.1 billion parcels per type of delivery. Sorry, 3.1 billion of the parcels, the 4.4 that were sent, is going standard delivery, which is with no specific time pressure, typically three to five working days, that's what you'll normally see. And then next-day delivery is between 1.2 and 1.4 billion parcels going next day. And those actually are quite a lot of high-pressure supply chain needs to happen in order to be able to turn those goods around that quickly. And interestingly, between 62 and 78 million same-day deliveries will go down in 2022, and this sector is something that is quite interesting because it is showing the biggest growth and it's also the biggest unknown. This is where AI and real-time access to inventory across the store network, rather than just in warehouses, could potentially really change our logistics model within the UK. So, it's an interesting space, a lot of growth in next day delivery as well. If you look at the low end of the prediction, the 1.2 to 1.4 billion, and the high end, 1.4, both set to go to 2 billion or 2.7 billion in 2027. So, next day is really where we see the most demand. There's a service expectation that's been created by big retailers like Amazon, like Tesco's, that next day really is what we expect with online retail. So, that's the area that we really expect to see the most growth, and like I say, it's a reasonably challenging thing to achieve even in a small country like ours.

 

Now, I touched on something there, which is about leveraging store, and a lot of retailers are what we would call Omni Channel, which means they have online sales and store sales, and sometimes some direct to other businesses sales as well. Now, the absolute vast majority of deliveries in 2022 are coming from warehouses rather than from store. Okay, now we expect to see quite a lot more use from store in 2027, double the current next-day volume and more like four times the current same-day volume. We don't see it having a huge level of uptake in standard delivery where time frame really isn't that important, but I think you'll see the trend of store-based e-commerce delivery coming up, and it can be potentially a much more sustainable route. So, it's an interesting space, but there are some really significant challenges to being able to deliver it. Okay.

 

So, 4.4 billion parcels every year in the UK this year. Now, it's not always just one journey, and I think you guys will understand this, but the average returns rate across all web sales is 15 percent. There are some sectors, women's clothing at 23%, footwear at 20%. It's practical. We all know that we want things to fit us and look good on us, and the truth is in the e-commerce world, that's a very hard thing to get right first time. And so, a lot of people will buy more than they need and send it back or buy things and if it doesn't fit them right, send them back. So, this is a big, big challenge in the industry, and if you look at 4.4 billion, 15% of those things getting a second journey, that's an awful lot of carbon footprint associated with returns. So, it's one of the big challenges in the industry: how can e-commerce reduce its returns rate?

 

There are also four more common reasons that you guys will probably have experienced as to why it might not just be a single journey delivery. One is failed first delivery with a re-delivery required; you've got your card, you weren't in, we didn't manage to find you, you're going to have to have that redelivered. Failed first delivery collection by customer, you're now as a customer going to need to go and collect those goods, that again has a footprint with it, so it's a very significant challenge. Late delivery, so not within the expected time window or the carrier didn't manage to get it to you in their time slot, that normally means going back to the hub and then coming out to you on a second journey. And order lost; it does happen in a career network, some careers worse than others, but order loss is a real thing. The top three of those in 2018 cost 1.6 billion in the UK, that was the cost of failed deliveries in terms of fuel, staffing resource, etc., that's the estimated cost of that. So, given the amount of growth that's gone on since 2018, that's likely to be a much larger number now.

 

Okay, so it's not always a success, and when it isn't, it's a bit of a problem. So, as I said, there are 12 million parcels moving around every day in the UK because of e-commerce, and a lot of you might not realize that this is the typical journey of a parcel in the UK. So firstly, it's collected from the vendor that you bought from, and it will be taken to a local hub, and that local hub will then sort all of those goods, and it will only keep stuff within its area. The rest of it, even if it's going next door, is going to the Midlands. All of it throughout the whole of the UK, all freight is shunted to the center of the country to be then re-shunted back out to be delivered by local depots, and as far as I'm aware, there are no couriers doing any sort of any form of local sortation. It is all done by centralized hubs.

So the first journey in a vehicle is from the vendor to the local hub. It's then shunted by lorry from that hub to their central super hub. The shunt is then sent from the super hub back to the local hub for delivery, and then from the local hub to your local delivery depot, and finally, it will make it onto a delivery driver's van to be delivered to you as the end customer. So, there is a huge amount of parcel mileage in the UK, and this, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the key opportunities in this sector to improve efficiency. Centralized hubbing is a main behavior now, and it all emulates the Royal Mail model. We all use our postcode areas; most of the depots follow that model very closely.

 

So now, this is all courier impossible. So, DPD has five super hubs in the UK, and I want to show you guys a super hub. We're lucky enough to get to visit these to see how packaging is being handled, to see what sort of damage products might get in transit, and how robustly they need to be packed. This is from the DPD superhub in Hinckley. Now, I don't know if any of you are sci-fi fans, but this felt like the inside of a destroyer in Star Wars. This place was so vast, and I want to show you it. Like I say, this is one of five super hubs that DPD have. I hope this works.

 

It really is, and how many days long is that, all right? How many days long? It just goes on forever.

 

So, this facility is a building that's five kilometers long, which is quite remarkable when you go there and see it. And as I said, they're sorting 72,000 parcels an hour. This is one of the couriers in the UK, and they have five of these. So remember when I said, what does 12 million parcels look like? I can't stress to you how big the infrastructure is to deliver this service to us. You know, when you click order online and that product gets to you, there's an awful lot going on in the UK overnight for that to reach you, and it's a huge, huge industry. So that's what a centralized sortation hub looks like, one of the biggest in Europe, and I could say 72,000 parcels an hour, and even this, when it comes to Black Friday with the big spike and Cyber Monday, will really struggle to keep up with the infrastructure, and they're already building another one in order to cope with future capacity.

 

Okay, so it's a really big industry. So I guess the big question is, is this all sustainable? And the most tempting answer would be for me to just go, no, it's not. It absolutely isn't. There's no way we can be moving this many parcels around the UK sustainably. And I think we're all aware that our choices have a carbon footprint, and the truth is that transport represents nearly a quarter, nearly 25%, of all UK emissions, and this sector is fast-growing and contributing to that. Incidentally, this is data from the year 2020, which is when we saw a dip in transport, so the true data could be higher than 25%.

 

You'll notice if you squint your eyes, a slightly downward trend on lots of these lines, except for agriculture and transport. Really proud, I think that we should be reducing emissions from our energy supply. It's a huge investment going into that space and rightly so because even if we move to electronic vehicles, etc., that's still energy and it has to be created. So, the carbon footprint of how we're producing our electricity is one of the most important sustainability challenges we have. But the truth is that transport really isn't showing the improvement that other sectors are, and that's mostly because of the growth in use. There are 4.1 million vans licensed in the UK, responsible for 55.5 billion vehicle miles every year. Again, numbers that are really hard to wrap your head around, and 10,400 of them were ultra-low emission vehicles, which is less than 0.2%.

 

So, the data for parcel delivery is the big challenge. We're moving an awful lot around, but there are only two vendors that I'm aware of in the UK that have committed to measure their emissions. DPD is one of them, and they do carbon-neutral delivery, and they have over 26,000 electric vehicles. But there's a huge, huge section of the market which isn't measuring their footprint. They're not actively participating in accurate carbon footprint tracking; they're not actively participating in the measurement of their emissions, and therefore, the amount of data we have to draw on is too low to actually draw proper conclusions on the footprint of this industry and what its trajectory could mean for the environment.

 

And if you go to trade.gov and look at the e-commerce rules and guidelines, there are 10 key documents which legislate it, and none of them talk about the environmental credentials of delivery or the supply chain. They're all just consumer promises about you getting good refunds and all of those good things that we're protected by in the UK, but there is no legislation around the carbon footprint for e-commerce, which might surprise some of you.

 

So, what are the opportunities to improve, and how can we drive improvement? Hopefully, I've made a reasonably strong case for the fact that we need to improve. It's a big industry, and its footprint is unregulated, growing, and needs to be improved. So, really, these are the key questions, as far as I'm concerned, which are, what are the opportunities, and how do we drive improvement?

 

The first thing to say before I move into detail on this is that there are loads of them, which is great. It's not an ultra-efficient industry with no opportunities to improve. It is an industry that has grown in response to rapid growth and demand, and so it functions. We have a great infrastructure, but there is so much room for improvement that it's an exciting space to be considering to work in, to apply knowledge to, and to optimize. There is so much opportunity in e-commerce supply chain, and there's an awful lot of money being spent in that industry, so it's a great industry to consider.

 

So, I think there are five key areas that are open to the biggest areas of improvement. There's so much more detail to go out, but I've tried to condense this down into five key areas for you guys. So firstly, I believe that we should be leveraging shared infrastructure, and I'm going to talk about that in a moment. Secondly, we should be reducing parcel mileage. Thirdly, we need to legislate carbon and emissions measurement and reduction. Fourthly, we need to minimize wasted space and maximize vehicle utilization. And fifthly, we need to decarbonize transport, especially in the final mile.

 

Just to explain, that final mile delivery is that last step where the courier vans are actually going out to deliver to you. And the truth is, if you live on a street, you're going to have six, ten different delivery vehicles drive down that street in your day from all different careers, none of them full. So there's an awful lot of emissions associated with final mile delivery, and it's probably the least efficient space in all of this supply chain. And so, decarbonizing that final mile is a huge area. So, I'm going to talk through those now.

 

So, the truth is, each courier has their own full setup of hubs, lorries, vehicles, and a network of infrastructure, and none of it is collaboratively shared. If one courier is shunting from Taunton in Somerset to Birmingham for a sortation with a van or a lorry that's only 10% full, the chances are there could be five or six of those lorries doing exactly the same journey, and there's no collaboration whatsoever.

 

So, some ideas about types of shared infrastructure that could make a difference, and in these five sections, guys, you're gonna see the same thing mentioned a few times, and that normally means it's an idea that could benefit across multiple of these challenges. One of those is Locker Delivery Systems. How many of you have heard of delivery lockers or collect your parcel from a locker? Yeah, if you've ever heard of them, okay, they are fast-growing. Now, 50% of the UK's city population in London, Birmingham, and Manchester are within a seven-minute walk of a parcel collection locker, and in France, 86% of e-commerce delivery is done by lockers. So, it's a massively popular system over there, not as popular here but growing very, very quickly. It gives the consumer convenience; you can go and collect it at your convenience, you don't have to be in. They can be placed at stations, petrol garages, shops, shopping centers, convenient multi-purpose locations that people can then swing by on their way to doing normal things in their life. And they are much more efficient from a final mile delivery. So, instead of a van going to 60 homes, it goes to one locker location and does the delivery for 60 homes in one place. Okay, so it's a potentially massive game-changer for the amount of carbon footprint associated with delivery and specifically in that final mile area. So, Locker Delivery Systems, if we in the UK could create a shared infrastructure for Locker Delivery Systems, it could make a huge difference to the footprint of e-commerce.

 

Third-party final mile specialists and shared final mile collaboration, so Ocado used to do this great thing and still do, but they were really early on it, like if you want to wait for your delivery for Thursday, we're actually delivering to three other people in your road on Thursday, so if you can take it then, we'll give you a discount. That increases vehicle utilization and is collaborative shared infrastructure. There's a lot of investment going into automated micro-hubs and collection points for cities. These are like Locker Delivery Systems but a bit more sophisticated and they can handle a lot more goods. The best way to imagine this is like an ATM, but you're collecting your parcel from it, so things that are becoming less used in cities like underground car parks and a lot of car parking facilities can suddenly become micro-hubs. They have automated distribution in them, so when you go to the door, you enter your parcel number that's collected by robot and delivered to you. Again, it allows for centralized handling of a large number of end-consumer parcels.

 

Shared shunt and vehicle space is something I mentioned earlier. There's an awful lot of wasted space in vehicles and there's no collaboration there, so sharing infrastructure for moving goods, potentially considering rail for central shunting, there are a lot of options to share collaborative space. All of this really needs to be enabled by data.

 

So, these two bullet points are fairly similar. One is that the industry needs a data-sharing and collaboration platform. They need a way, a standardized way to share data on the movement of goods, on the movement of their vehicles so that it can drive shared infrastructure and more sophisticated modeling and forecasting. It's very, very difficult in this space to model demand, and the truth is, by sharing the infrastructure of their data, the couriers could take a bigger view on the market and start to have a much better understanding of when they need to peak forecast, when they need capacity, and who might have capacity to share.

 

So, these are the key areas around leveraging shared infrastructure, reducing parcel mileage - one I've already touched on but leveraging AI for more intelligent delivery routing. A lot of routing for couriers is done by brain, and that's perfectly fine, but I'm absolutely certain that there are efficiencies to be found, and so AI could definitely be used more proactively for delivery routing to reduce the footprint of final mile delivery.

 

Um, exploring decentralized sorting models, so how can we get the technology to those local hubs to deliver to their local hubs rather than centralized shunting with a lorry all the way back for other lorries to go around the UK? So, how can we decentralize our sorting models, using store inventory to fulfill, using stock that's closer to the customer? You know, this is something that Argos are doing fantastically well with their online delivery service. When you order an item from there, you can see whether it's in your local store, you can opt to click and collect. Normally that click and collect won't involve a logistics journey; it'll be stock that's already available in-store. So, leveraging what we've already got there to minimize the need to move parcels around the UK is another big opportunity. Again, it's a technical challenge, it's a data challenge.

 

And then reducing final mile and travel with locker and collection point approach is going to come up quite a lot, that one, because it potentially could make a really big difference.

 

Legislate carbon emissions measurement and reduction. As I said, this isn't regulated right now, and it should be, as far as I'm concerned. And this is one of the things, if you read Bill Gates' "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster," there's a whole chapter on the power of government to legislate and change industries. And the truth is, courier companies exist to make money and they exist for their shareholders, and so it's going to be very, very hard for them to turn around and say, "Oh, actually, you know what, we're not going to make loads of money this year because we think the right thing to do is to be climate neutral." Not many companies are able to make that decision because they're very commercial entities. It's very, very different, therefore, when the government turns around and says, "You need to do this to be compliant," as a company that then becomes in their interest to drive commercial change in that space. So, the government and legislation have a huge level of power and responsibility, I think, to drive change in this space.

 

So, even if they just said that every courier in the UK needs to understand what their carbon emissions are to this standard and it was audited, that would be a great starting point. What is measured is managed. If you understand what the problem is, you can start changing it, and then you can commit to science-based targets and then actually measure your year-on-year changes and learn. The need to incentivize EV adoption and carbon footprint reduction - you've got to have it measured before you can start reducing it, but there are other things that they can do to make macro effects. So, by making electric vehicles tax-subsidized or more affordable, they can drive the adoption rate up. Most delivery vehicles will have a 10 to 20-year lifespan though, so even if we put a lot of pressure on EVs now, there are vans that are going to be on the road for 20 years still. They're still going to be there, so this is going to take time to really have a huge impact.

 

Set a carbon neutrality deadline. The courier industry doesn't have one. If they were all told they need to be carbon neutral by 2030, for instance, it would really put a commercial imperative on them to do so and set a target for the industry as a whole to drive collaboration and ownership. This is to do with that social consciousness, and I think this is so important because if some couriers take on the cost of becoming climate neutral, they become expensive relative to the rest of the market. That means it's beneficial to not be engaging with sustainability. You can suddenly undercut all of these providers that are doing the right thing. Without a collective target for the industry, we are actually creating pressure against sustainability. And that's so, so important to understand. This is why the locker solution that I mentioned is super attractive because it actually reduces delivery cost, so that is a more sustainable option that costs less. And that's brilliant. Some of the others, like carbon offsetting or adopting electronic vehicles earlier, increase that courier cost and therefore can make the less sustainable couriers look more attractive.

 

To minimize wasted space or maximize vehicle utilization, very similar thing. This is something that we at Priory Direct focus on massively. We want to eliminate all shipped air. Packaging should be right-sized to items. I'm sure some of you have received items from certain online retailers that have come in a box that's way too big, stuffed with paper to protect it, and it's wasted material. But the actual biggest harm that that causes isn't the footprint of the material and the waste stream thereafter. It's the fact that there are vehicles driving around full of air. If you can right-size the packaging around items, you can drastically reduce the number of vehicles required to deliver those 12 million parcels a day. It sounds like a really small thing, but the truth is, the amount of air and wasted void fill in the market, especially in shipped goods, is massive, and we could drastically reduce the footprint of e-commerce just by getting everybody to right-size their packaging, to switch to bags, to switch to wrap-around packaging, to use automated boxing machines which create a carton specifically for the item, leverage data to allow for better collaboration between couriers to avoid empty journeys and wasted space or inappropriate vehicles. 

 

Why send a lorry if it's only a van worth of goods? Why send an empty lorry when there's a courier that's got enough space? They're sending a lorry to the same place. There is so much opportunity for collaboration in the supply chain here that is not being capitalized on. Manage customer expectations and give more choice on delivery timings to ensure fuller final mile vehicles. If you know you've got a full van every three days to that street, ask people. Say look, we can actually do this delivery on Thursday much more efficiently. Give them a cost premium or a saving because you won't need a driver for two days in order to achieve that. This is something where we need to manage customer expectations, focus on that sustainability agenda, and give more choice.

 

And then here it is again, deliver to locker boxes and local micro-hubs for individuals to collect from is so, so important. And finally, decarbonizing transport, especially final mile. These are becoming much more common. You'll see more of these. These are parcel bikes. You know, they're human-powered vans, sometimes with a battery as well. Encourage the adoption of electric vehicles throughout the supply chain. It's a necessary step. It needs to be taken, and we need to encourage it, encourage the use of human power, delivery, and collection bikes, walking to local hubs, and collecting from locker boxes. It's all much, much better to not be burning fossil fuels in order to make those collections and deliveries, leverage store inventory for local order fulfillment and collection. We've covered improved delivery tracking accuracy and access to in-flight rescheduling. So, if you're not going to be at home, tell them. Have the ability to do that so that they're not making a wasted journey and give better tracking windows to improve that delivery success. And this is all about those dual journeys, those failed deliveries, and then improve online user experiences to minimize returns and wasted journeys. 

 

So, there are some widgets now where if you're buying a shoe, you can compare that brand's shoe fit to six of the most popular brands on the market. Now, that just looks like an online user experience tool, but the truth is it drastically reduces returns by ensuring that the item that is delivered is right-sized and right-fitted for the person. So, there's a lot to be said about online user experience in this space to drive better delivery success and reduce returns. Okay. So, it's quite a long list of things that can be improved, and the truth is if we spent more time on it, we could come up with an awful lot more as well. And that, I hope, is exciting or at least of interest because it's an industry full of opportunity to improve, and there's an awful lot of opportunity to learn, gather data, study, and suggest improvements for this particular area. 

 

So, that's everything I wanted to say to you guys. Thank you for listening to me. Hopefully, I've made sense. Do you have any questions at all for me? Thank you. Okay. Don't be shy if you've got anything to ask about my career, about where you're going after your degree, anything like that. No worries about the questions you have in the meantime. 

 

So, very interesting, as I said, and there are lots of things that we are doing research on within the areas that you mentioned. A very interesting line of research as well, but the problem is companies are not really willing to go with collaborative, plus they don't like to share the data info, so that's what the question I wanted to ask when we are talking about e-commerce and all the carbon emissions from e-commerce. We have to think about the alternative, which was traditional brick and mortar. Yes, would provide fair and buy the goods that we wanted. Any idea how the two models compare? Do you think e-commerce overall has improved the carbon emission or how? This is a very good question, and there are limited quality answers to it because there are so many variables. If you compare e-commerce in a rural environment where everyone drives to stores and one vehicle per person driving to the store versus one van doing the journey of loads of shoppers, e-commerce wins hands down. It's much, much more sustainable, much lower carbon footprint. If you compare that to a city where people walk to the shops in order to do their purchasing and driving vehicles in traffic through cities is not very efficient, then final mile delivery in cities can actually make e-commerce less sustainable than traditional retail. 

 

So, it's a depends answer, and on aggregate, I believe e-commerce can be more efficient and more sustainable than traditional retail, but it's totally reliant on these supply chain discussions. Can I say something on the collaboration thing? That's why I believe this idea of an industry-wide target is so important because all the while you've got sharks in the pool, you've got people just trying to fulfill their own commercial agenda. That's the challenge you're always going to have, which is that they don't want every or Hermes to see their delivery data or use their infrastructure. No, they don't want that. It doesn't suit them because that's a competitive advantage. But if the industry was told, "Hey, we need to reduce the carbon footprint of final mile delivery by 25% by 2025," then they'd be like, "Okay, how are we going to do that?" And suddenly, collaboration becomes a really attractive option. But until we've got those targets, it's always going to be about individuals trying to fulfill their own commercial agenda. 

 

We've seen it with consolidation in the last mile delivery as well. We've seen how Amazon has done that in the US and in the UK, and we're seeing it elsewhere in the world. That consolidation is a response to the fact that the industry needs to consolidate, it needs to collaborate in order to reduce that final mile footprint. But yeah, until there's that commercial imperative, we're always going to have this issue where it's about everyone fulfilling their own agenda. That was a fantastic question. Anybody else got any thoughts or questions? Thank you, guys. It's been a pleasure.