British retailer Asda has expanded the number of stores from which it offers home delivery services powered by electric vehicles.
The UK’s third-largest supermarket said that grocery orders from its Gillingham Pier, Old Kent Road and Sheffield Chaucer stores will now be fulfilled by electric vehicles.
This means that some 345,000 households in the store catchment areas will now have access to ‘greener’ delivery services.
Each electric vehicle can run for up to 120 miles per charge, requiring seven hours recharge time. Using these electric vehicles will save over 400,000 CO2 (kg) per year, Asda said.
Net Zero Ambitions
“Using electric rather than diesel delivery vehicles will lead to huge reductions in our emissions and go a long way to achieve our goals of halving our greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and becoming carbon net zero by 2040,” commented Asda senior vice president of e-commerce, Simon Gregg.
“We are really excited that we are now able to make all deliveries from three stores entirely electric and we’ll be closely monitoring performance of the vans to learn and evolve our approach for future.”
Read More: Asda To Acquire Petrol Stations Operator EG Group UK
Further Expansion
Elsewhere, Asda added that it plans to offer electric vehicle deliveries in two more stores by the end of the year - in Cardiff Bay and Leith.
The move represents the first stage of Asda’s ambition to completely remove diesel vehicles from its grocery home delivery fleet by 2028.
Recently, Asda announced a year-long trial that will see grocery deliveries carried out autonomously in partnership with Wayve.
© 2023 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Stephen Wynne-Jones. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: European Supermarket Magazine.
