Small steps towards energy efficiency may not seem like they add up to much around your home. Changing an incandescent bulb to a compact fluorescent saves you $3 per bulb each year -- nice, but not enough for a beer at the ballpark. But if you're Wal-Mart and use hundreds of thousands of bulbs, changing to CFLs can add up to millions in savings.
UPS recently made a similar discovery, finding that smarter route planning added up to enormous rewards:
At $4 a gallon, conserving 3 million gallons of gas translates to a savings of $12 million.Company leaders figured out that sitting in traffic, waiting to make a left, burns way too much fuel. So they zapped as many left turns as they could from 100,000 truck routes a day.
Instead, drivers are handed computer-generated delivery routes that have them going in efficiently calculated loops, calling for left turns only when necessary.
"You start on the right-hand side of the street and you stay on the right-hand side of the street almost all of the day," said Dan McMackin, a former UPS driver who is now a company spokesman. "The only left turn you make is to come home."
According to the company, this simple technique saves an eye-popping amount of gasoline. "In the last year alone," a UPS release stated, "this system has shaved nearly 30 million miles off UPS's delivery routes, saved 3 million gallons of gas, and reduced emissions by 32,000 metric tons of CO2 - the equivalent of removing 5,300 passenger cars off the road for an entire year."
4 comments:
Nice find Miles, that's pretty ridiculous. Bet it took some deliberate attempt to brainstorm and be innovative, and/or to be open and solicit ideas from drivers. Cool stuff
It is good to see that companies are starting to see energy savings as being beneficial to their bottom line.
sidd
This is very good but can't ups do anything more than cutting left turns. They can do the same thing to all of their trucks. They also use a lot of gas by using these big trucks. Instead, they can try using smaller trucks or use biodesil for fuel.
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Tis is informative to how large companies can make a difference. How much fuel and money would UPS save if they had every truck cut left turns. What if they had trucks with better fuel effieceny on top of cutting left turns. WHat if they used smaller vehichles with better MPG.
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