Amazon has announced that it has deployed its first fleet of electric cargo bikes in London, designed to deliver thousands of packages every day quickly and without any CO2 emissions. Currently being tested in one part of the city, this initiative forms part of Amazon's broader plan to achieve carbon neutrality within the next 20 years.
A first micromobility center has now been installed in London's Hackney district. Taking the form of veritable small electric delivery vans, these cargo bikes and their riders aim to make up to one million "last mile" deliveries per year in the center of the British capital. With Amazon's entire electric fleet, up to five million deliveries could be made each year in London alone, all using non-polluting vehicles.
In 2021, Amazon delivered more than 45 million packages with its fleet of more than 1,000 electric vans on the roads of the United Kingdom. These will soon be joined by five fully electric heavy goods vehicles.
Cargo bikes seem to be emerging as the ideal solution for local, urban deliveries, as evidenced by the development of depots dedicated to electric cargo bikes in Prague, Czech Republic. As such, every day, several hundred orders are fulfilled in an environmentally friendly way. In the United States, faced with the congestion caused by delivery vans in large American cities, the URB-E startup is now making cargo bikes available to delivery drivers so that they can transport their orders more quickly and without pollution. In Florida, the US Postal Service (USPS) is also trialing a means of delivering mail and packages using electric cargo bikes.
Note that, in its effort to move towards carbon neutrality, Amazon has also unveiled plans to deploy more than 30,000 new solar panels on its sites in Manchester, Coalville, Haydock, Bristol and Milton Keynes before the end of the year, in order to power them exclusively with renewable energy. Indeed, Amazon is committed to becoming fully carbon-neutral by 2040.
