Decentralising construction site logistics to outside urban areas

Published on 29/03/2018

On Friday 23 March 2018 during the Luxembourgish closing event of the European SUCCESS ("Sustainable Urban Consolidation CentrES for construction") project, LIST and TRALUX presented the highly positive project results. Funded by the European Union's H2020 programme, SUCCESS, which started in 2015 with the aim of reducing pollution and transport costs in the building industry by optimising the supply chain, is drawing to a close. At the event, entrepreneurs, policy makers and researchers discovered the benefits of CCCs: hubs located near urban centres where suppliers can deliver goods with fewer restrictions and where trucks can turn and unload easily. At these centres, building materials can be stored safely, deliveries can be organised to make them as smooth as possible, and urgent needs expressed by sites can be met more promptly.

Improved construction site logistics

Research conducted as part of the project clearly demonstrated that introducing CCCs can cut the number of daily journeys to construction sites by up to 65%, which has a major impact on congestion, safety and pollution. And those are just a few of the immediate social and environmental advantages for the people living in the neighbourhoods concerned.

CCCs can also benefit the building industry economically by offering complementary services such as pre-assembly, "kitting" (the grouping together of materials/components into functional bundles with just-in-time delivery), and flexible working hours for the receipt and delivery of goods. CCCs thus allow construction companies to improve productivity by focusing on their core business, and suppliers to optimise transport.

Tools for the best possible roll-out of CCCs

CCCs are complex to implement and must be designed on a case-by-case basis, so SUCCESS project partners are offering a range of tools to help construction companies and local authorities decide if, how and where to build them, and suggest improvements tailored to each construction site.

These tools will be freely available on the project website www.success-urbanlogistics.eu from the end of April, and comprise several elements:

A costs-benefits analysis for the creation of a CCC;
A solutions selector identifying the best practices to be adopted;
A tool to determine the best location for a CCC from a series of options;
A best practices guide listing the most innovative practices in Europe and the United States.

Luxembourg City, one of the test cities

To achieve these results, project partners evaluated the benefits of using a CCC in the project's four pilot cities: Luxembourg City, Paris, Valencia and Verona. In Luxembourg, the study shows that the use of a CCC can achieve environmental and socio-economic benefits if certain conditions are met.

Discussions with logistics providers will soon begin to share the results of the study and identify key players who may be interested in offering this new service.

>> Discover the project and its results in a special video: