Sustainable home deliveries

With demand for home delivery increasing around the world, air and noise pollution in our cities is a growing concern. At the same time, we want to make the shopping experience as convenient as possible for our customers. That’s why we are committed to zero-emission home deliveries in all our markets by 2025.

“We need to find new ways to be part of the solution, not the problem,” says Angela Hultberg, Sustainable Mobility leader, Ingka Group.

We want our home delivery service to meet our customers’ expectations on accessibility and convenience in a sustainable way. We are already seeing low-emission zones, road tolls for fossil fuel vehicles and diesel bans, as well as incentive programmes for zero-emission vehicles. So switching to zero-emission home deliveries is crucial for our business.

While there are some obstacles on the road towards electromobility – cost, infrastructure and availability of vehicles among them – Angela says the technology available today is good enough to start the transformation to a more sustainable way of delivering goods.

“People’s expectations are changing. We are no longer prepared to wait a week or two for the things we order, and because we are ordering online that means smaller loads and more vehicles on the roads. But if we double or triple deliveries, transport emissions will increase accordingly. We are faced with the risk of becoming a major polluter in our cities and that is not who we are as a company,” Angela says.

Full speed ahead

In June 2018, we set ourselves some ambitious targets, going all-in to secure 100% zero-emission home deliveries in all of our markets by 2025. We also want to get a head start and get there even faster in major cities like Amsterdam, Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Shanghai by 2020.

And we are already making progress. We have deployed electric vehicles in Australia, China, France and India to name a few, and more zero emission vehicles are on the way in many markets. However, we still have a lot to do and it will require strong collaboration to make it happen – both internally and externally.

“We can only do this together with our partners,” says Marcus Baumgartner, Customer Fulfilment Manager, Ingka Group.

“It will require all of us – within our company, transport companies, manufacturers, energy companies and others – to work together to find new solutions. And not just with existing partners, but new partners as well, such as new platforms for sharing vehicles and infrastructure, start-ups of different kinds, charging experts, everyone passionate about making last-mile delivery better for both people and planet. This is not as simple as replacing a combustion engine truck with an electric truck, we need to find new ways of working, too. Zero-emission deliveries are an essential part of our transformation – and I’m excited to be along for the ride!”