Amazon Joins the Urban Freight Lab

July 20, 2020 // Urban Freight Lab

July 20, 2020 — The Supply Chain Transportation & Logistics Center is pleased to announce Amazon as the newest member of our Urban Freight Lab (UFL), an innovative public-private partnership working collaboratively across sectors to design and test improvements to the urban goods delivery system.

“We are very pleased to include Amazon’s perspective within the Urban Freight Lab and look forward to including them in ongoing pilot tests and research efforts,” said Anne Goodchild, founding director of the Urban Freight Lab. “As the world’s largest retailer and a rapidly growing carrier, Amazon holds a unique place in the urban logistics space.”

Amazon co-founded the Climate Pledge in 2019 with Global Optimism, an organization led by former UN Climate Change Chief Christiana Figueres, committing Amazon—and challenging other companies to commit—to meeting Paris Agreement goals 10 years early,. Companies are expected to regularly measure and report greenhouse gas emissions, implement decarbonization strategies, and take actions to neutralize any remaining emissions with additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially-beneficial offsets. Some of the ways that Amazon is already taking action to meet The Climate Pledge include purchasing 100,000 electrical delivery vans from Rivian by 2030 (10,000 on the road as early as 2022), reducing packaging waste, and generating renewable solar and wind energy.

Amazon joins some of the largest players in transportation and logistics – giants Expeditors International of Washington, Ford Motor Co., General Motors, Michelin, Nordstrom, PepsiCo, UPS, and United States Postal Service, and startups CurbFlow, and Boeing HorizonX, parking magnate REEF Technology, commercial real estate membership association Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) – Seattle King County, and industrial real estate operator Terreno Realty Corporation.

Read more:

About the Urban Freight Lab (UFL): An innovative public-private partnership housed at the Supply Chain Transportation & Logistics Center at the University of Washington, the Urban Freight Lab is a structured workgroup that brings together private industry with City transportation officials to design and test solutions around urban freight management. Since launching in December 2016, the UFL has completed an innovative suite of research projects on the Final 50 Feet of delivery, providing foundational data and proven strategies to help cities reduce truck dwell times in load/unload spaces, and failed first delivery attempts by carriers, which lowers congestion, emissions, and costs.

About Amazon: Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon.