The municipality of Parma developed an innovative urban food delivery system: Ecocity. With Ecocity, the city has redesigned its urban goods haulage through renewed logistics services, in collaboration with Centro Agro Alimentare e Logistica (CAL). The project has implemented an urban distribution center with delivery services of selected food products categories, using environmental friendly vehicles, and optimizing load factors and routes thanks to ICT tools.

An insufficient urban food supply system can have an impact on the city environmental sustainability, in terms of emissions and food availability for the community. A lack of adequate infrastructure can cause food wastes, while inefficient transportation would negatively impact Greenhouse Gases emissions.

Ecocity includes a renewed logistics platform dedicated to food products implemented at CAL, and a fleet of twelve natural gas powered vehicles. The local authority promoted a new act to regulate freight transport in the limited traffic area. Moreover, the freight mobility plan adopts an ICT platform for the optimization of routes, which provides dynamic routing and scheduling to reduce distances travelled.

The project allows to rationalise and optimise the deliveries through an ecofriendly service. Vehicles filling rate raises, environmental impact is reduced together with the number of commercial vehicles in the city centre, and the effectiveness of the whole delivery of good is increased.

Photo by Arno Senoner on Unsplash