Sustainable People Home-Work Logistics: An Integrated Model of Circular Economy in the Chiampo Valley

Abstract

Logistics activities, e.g., transportations of goods and people, are responsible for at least one-third of energy consumption and Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. About 70% of them are related to people’s mobility, with millions of cars moving every day. The people home-work logistics represents undoubtedly an important part of it since flows are concentrated on fixed time windows (beginning, lunch break, and end of the working day) creating huge traffic congestions and negative impacts on time, economics, and the environment. This study proposes an integrated model, summarized through a methodological framework, where three actors (companies, public administrations and local shops) work together aiming to economically incentivize the use of sustainable mobility systems. Three are the main elements of the proposed sustainable people home-work logistics model: (1) the economic self-sustainability of the incentives, funded in different ways by the actors, (2) the scalability, thanks to the possibility to add new territories to the project and (3) the territorial circular economy generated thanks to the incentive’s destinations and the public-private integration. Starting from survey questionnaires and territorial attributes, sustainable mobility ways are defined. Then, participant workers are monitored by activating a mobile app, called Ecoattivi, during their home-work journeys. In such a way, workers can directly analyze their sustainable mobility and reach the possibility to accumulate and spend money in local shops as a function of the saved CO2. On the other hand, companies and public administrations compete in a special ranking for sustainable mobility. The methodological framework has been applied to a real case study in the Chiampo Valley, in the northeast of Italy, where about 10 small towns and dozens of companies in 2020 started the “Bike to Work Valchiampo” project.