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Alan McKinnon – Professor of Logistics

THE 
LOGISTICS BLOG

Current issues in logistics and transport

Procuring Green Logistics

Last month, during the first Smart Freight Week in Rotterdam, the Sustainable Freight Buyers Alliance (SFBA) was officially launched. This joint initiative by the Smart Freight Centre, the World Economic Forum and BSR will promote procurement as a means of … Continue reading

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Resilient Adaptation

Back in 2004 I wrote a report entitled ‘life without lorries’ to show how dependent we are on road haulage in the UK.  It examined how long it would take for supplies of most products to run out in the … Continue reading

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Let’s Get Physical – with the Physical Internet

I wonder how many readers are familiar with the Physical Internet concept, or PI for short.  As the name suggests, it would be a physical manifestation of the digital internet applying similar organisational principles to the movement of freight as … Continue reading

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Taxing Decisions

Taxes on transport fuel generate around £28 billion of UK government income annually, but not for much longer. As we transition to an era of low-carbon electro-mobility, they will need to be replaced by a new system of distance-based charging.  … Continue reading

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In Praise of the Double-deck Trailer   

The double-deck trailer is the unsung hero of UK logistics.  Few road freight innovations have brought such economic and environmental benefit and yet been largely confined to this country. The double-deck is a form of ‘high-capacity transport’ made possible by … Continue reading

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Personal Carbon Allowances – a New Year ‘Thought Experiment’

Imagine that it’s January 2030 and last month you had to adjust your Christmas shopping to a new constraint. As the year-end approached, your annual personal carbon allowance,  or PCA, was running out and so you had to find low-carbon … Continue reading

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Logistics at COP26

I was one of 14,124 observers at COP26 and there was plenty to observe.  COP conferences have three layers: an inner sanctum where government negotiators wrangle over the climate agreement, a ‘blue zone’ full of country and organisational pavilions where … Continue reading

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Boxed-in: containerised congestion

In his excellent 2020 book ‘Outside the Box’ Marc Levinson describes how container shipping has ‘supercharged international commerce’ over the past 60 years.  Since his book was published, though, we have witnessed the dark-side of containerising much of the world’s … Continue reading

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Targeting Rail Freight

Targeting Rail Freight The UK government published its long-awaited ‘Decarbonising Transport’ plan in July.  It contains a commitment to ‘work closely with industry partners to develop’ ‘a rail freight growth target’.  It would actually be better to set a freight … Continue reading

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‘Heroes of the Road’

A UK government report in 1975 suggested that lorry traffic would grow ‘in perpetuity’ – in other words, forever1.  One of its main critics, Dr. John Adams, then felt at liberty to extrapolate its forecast well into the future, to … Continue reading

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© Professor Alan McKinnon 2025

Kuehne Logistics University
Hamburg
Germany

contactme@alanmckinnon.co.uk

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© Professor Alan McKinnon 2025

 

Kuehne Logistics University
Hamburg
Germany

 

contactme@alanmckinnon.co.uk

 

Contact me

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