Six Oxford colleges are joining a Pedal and Post pilot scheme to improve their sustainability.
Pedal and Post is a courier service operating from a depot on Binsey Lane. After packages are delivered there, they will then be taken to colleges via cargo bike.
The service will involve no extra delivery cost, but students will be asked to change their address in online orders to that of the depot.
This follows Wolfson College’s trial in February, pioneering the attempt to reduce carbon emissions and traffic from delivery vans by switching to electric tricycles.
Wolfson’s President, Sir Tim Hitchens, told The Oxford Mail they on average received “75 van deliveries per week during term time”, so the trial would “reduce that to just one delivery by bike per day” for a more sensible and sustainable model.
The six colleges making up the 12-month college freight pilot this time are Univ, Wadham, Corpus Christi, St Anne’s, Wolfson, and Magdalen College.
In a statement about their participation, Univ said they “have up to 100 parcels delivered to the Lodge on a daily basis across more than a dozen different delivery drops” so the change to “one delivery each afternoon from the cargo bikes” will be significant.
The college encouraged students to engage with the scheme for both environmental and “cyclist and pedestrian safety” reasons.
The Tab reported that the project has received ÂŁ30,000 of funding from participating colleges and estimations show it could save around 200 tons of COâ‚‚.
Pedal and Post predict savings of “204g CO₂ per parcel for the last mile section of the delivery supply chain” using a 2022 study.
After the project has been running for three terms, the Domestic Bursars’ Committee at each college will review the impact and decide its future.
This follows the release of Oxford college sustainability rankings by the Climate League of Oxford Cambridge (CLOC), within which pilot participants generally took middle positions from St Anne’s at 8th to Wadham at 24th.
Image credit: Craig Stanfill via flickr
Image description: a row of bicycles parked in Oxford
