Great news for Oxford residents is that delivery firm DPD has announced that all of the city’s parcels delivered from its new Bicester depot will be carried out using electric vehicles (EVs). DPD, who are leaders in sustainable deliveries, have now started their zero-emission deliveries across the city, with nine further UK ‘green cities’ to be confirmed this year.
The new 60,000 square foot depot hub at Bicester’s Symmetry Park was opened last month. It is the company’s first ‘net zero carbon in construction building’ and is DPD’s most sustainable facility within its UK network. Once fully operational, the depot could create up to 250 new jobs.
Here DPD has a fleet of 40 electric vehicles that will deliver over 15,000 parcels a week across the city of Oxford. This is part of the company’s Vision 25 strategy that pledges zero-emissions deliveries to 25 major UK towns and cities by 2025.
This will cover 25 percent of the UK population by 2025 and is backed by a £111m investment in electric vehicles. The initiative will deliver 42,000 tonnes of CO2 savings for the UK, or the equivalent of planting 170,000 trees by the end of 2025.
In the UK 24 other towns and cities will be included in the initiative. This will include Birmingham, Bradford, Brighton and Hove, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Coventry, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Derby, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kingston-upon-Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Reading, Sheffield, Southampton and Stoke-on-Trent.
Tim Jones, director of marketing, communications and sustainability at DPD Group UK, will be speaking at this year’s EV Summit regarding DPD’s fleet electrification plans. The Summit, which returns as an in-person event, brings together the world’s most significant gathering of emobility leaders.
Olly Craughan, DPD’s head of CSR, said: “ This is a landmark day for us. To be able to say we can now deliver to a city the size of Oxford, using only electric vehicles, is a huge leap forward not only us, but for the sector as a whole.
“We are on track to repeat this in nine more cities this year. We’ve been working with electric vehicles for the past three years and we have learned a lot in that time. As well as investing in the vehicles themselves, we’ve created a whole new smart delivery system around them, including the charging infrastructure.
“Bicester is the greenest and most sustainable facility in our UK network and it is right that we start the roll-out of our 25 green cities here, at a time when Oxford itself is taking a huge step with the Zero Emission Zone pilot due to be launched later this year.
“Our whole approach to sustainability is about joining up the dots beyond just buying electric vehicles. And that means working with others on initiatives like city centre emissions schemes and measuring air quality. With this approach, we will be helping reduce emissions one city centre at a time, starting with Oxford.”
