Measuring CO2 Emissions in E-Commerce Deliveries: From Empirical Studies to a New Calculation Approach

The rapid development of e-commerce during the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an increase in the demand for urban deliveries. In this study, we conduct an exploratory analysis to identify factors that influence the fuel consumption and related greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) of vans and trucks used for e-commerce delivery. The novelty of this research results from the proposal of a new actionable approach to calculate CO2 emissions from heterogeneous fleets in e-commerce deliveries. Through a literature review, a survey of transport managers, and a case study on e-commerce deliveries, we have found that the heterogeneous fleet structure impacts direct emissions from urban deliveries. We have taken into account the parameters of a heterogeneous fleet structure, such as gross weight, mass, fuel type, engine size, fuel consumption (liters/100 km), and the age of a vehicle. Through numerical experiments, we have identified that the age of a vehicle results in increased fuel consumption of 1.31% year-to-year for vans and 1.01% year-to-year for 18-t trucks. For that reason, we proposed a novel formula to calculate the direct CO2 emissions from heterogeneous fleets in e-commerce deliveries, which takes into consideration the age-related fuel consumption factor and the structure of a fleet.