Mechelen-Lille Staff Exchange in Belgium!
On 10 of June, the City of Lille visited the city of Mechelen in Belgium for a new SPOTLOG Staff Exchange.
The exchange started with a visit to the depot of Bpost, the national postal and courier company. Bpost delivers the whole city of Mechelen with zero-emission vehicles and the city center with only bikes with trailers: their CO2 emissions are drastically reduced.
A second visit was to the the food hub. The project foodsavers collects food surpluses from different supermarkets and divides them again to several social organisations. They created in this way a centralised and consolidated way to collect food surpluses. The deliveries in the city center are being done with an electric cargobike.
Then the tour continued with a visit to Foodsprint, a cargo bike delivery service of refrigerated goods. The founder of the company told us how he started in Brussels and then enlarged to other cities, becoming the first profitable bike courier company in Belgium.
After a nice lunch, a presentation was given about all the sustainable logistics initiatives in the last years both in Lille and Mechelen, and both cities went through a similar transformation in redesigning the public space and roads with more space for the cyclists and pedestrians.