Land Efficient Mobility and Emissions: Click and Collect vs. Grocery Deliveries in Switzerland

Maren Schnieder (), Chris Hinde and Andrew West
Additional contact information
Maren Schnieder: Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK
Chris Hinde: Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK
Andrew West: Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 11, 1-24

Abstract: Online grocery shopping is an emerging market. It caused visible growth in last mile delivery services, which has resulted in concerns about its external effects (e.g., pollution, land use, congestion). The study outlined in this paper proposes a grocery delivery concept where goods are transported by train to the customer’s nearest station, and then the consumer either picks up the groceries (i.e., click and collect) or the goods are delivered to the customer’s home, or to a locker. The focus of this paper is primarily based on the last mile delivery part of the supply chain (i.e., from the train station to the customer). The land use efficiency and emissions of each delivery concept have been evaluated based on the time-area concept and the Handbook Emission Factors for Road Transport (HBEFA 4.1), respectively. This large-scale simulation considers every household in Switzerland with various levels of demand and supermarket network densities. Two machine learning techniques (i.e., random forest and decision tree) have been used to categorise all neighbourhoods within Switzerland based on the best delivery method in terms of emissions and land efficiency. The results show that, depending on the scenarios (e.g., 10 or 100% of the households taking part), home delivery can be better for 76–89% of these communities when compared with a click and collect option based on their land use efficiency.

Keywords: carbon emissions; grocery shopping; eGroceries; supermarkets; grocery delivery; click and collect; land use efficiency; time-area concept (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/11/8814/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/11/8814/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:11:p:8814-:d:1159544

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().