In December of 2022, the UK-based Centre for Sustainable Road Freight (SRF) had its ninth-annual international conference. Reading that, it doesn’t sound like a promising start to an engaging article. But it actually is because of what it clearly shows, I promise.
What’s the provenance of the SRF? It was founded a decade or so ago as a multi-institute research organization with funding from across Europe, and a mandate to bring insights from the world to the UK to help clean up the sector. Heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) represent about 6% of the UK’s CO2 (not CO2e) emissions. And of course, HGVs are also a major source of air pollution, so there are multiple values to fixing this.