Delivery

 

When you see one of our trucks driving down the street, the business of delivering water probably looks fairly straightforward. The reality is that a lot of thinking goes into our distribution processes to make them as efficient and environmentally responsible as possible.

While increased transportation for returnable refillable containers can sometimes impact the energy balance, all of our returnable refillable bottles are transported relatively short distances and then returned on the same trucks heading back to their distribution centres. This reverse logistics system results in less energy consumed relative to the distances traveled by single-serve containers. Our delivery vehicles travel an average of 24,500 kilometres per year, which is very low for most truck delivery businesses. This is accomplished because our production plants tend to be situated as close as possible to the centre of our customer clusters in larger urban areas to minimize distances traveled. On top of this, we plan our routes daily to optimize the shortest distances for our tens of thousands of customers.

Hybrids and alternative fuels: the right low-emission truck for the job

In 2010 we won Beverage World magazine’s North American Fleet of the Year award for our efforts in acquiring our first hybrid electric delivery trucks. Our hybrids can reduce fuel use by up to 40% on certain routes. Because of this, we continue to explore new low-emission vehicle solutions to optimize our fleet on a route-by-route basis. Some candidates are dual-fuel propane/diesel or natural gas trucks, not to mention all-electric smaller service vehicles.

Read more about our hybrid electric truck success here.

 

Some delivery numbers:

• 200+ modern delivery trucks

• 24,500 km/yr. average distance traveled for each truck

• 1.7 million deliveries per year

• 13 million+ 18-litre bottles delivered per year = 250,000,000 litres of drinking water

• These water delivery totals do not include drinking water provided by our many thousands of tap water filtration systems or the water used in our coffee and tea brewers