China Releases its 2014-2020 Logistics Mid- to Long-Term Development Plan

Date Posted: 2014-10-20

The State Council of the People's Republic of China formally released the 2014-2020 Mid-to Long-Term Plan for Logistics Development on 4 October, 2014.  The full text of the policy can be found in Chinese at http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2014-10/04/content_9120.htm.

While the entire policy is highly relevant to the development of the freight and logistics sector in China, Clean Air Asia has prepared a preliminary translation of key mentions of energy efficiency and green freight, highlighted below:

Current situation:

1.  Resource and environmental constraints are increasing. With the rapid expansion of the scale of logistics throughout society, energy consumption and environmental pollution, along with urban traffic is increasing, thus making traditional logistics operations difficult to sustain. In accordance with the requirements of ecological civilization, we must accelerate the use of advanced operations management philosophy, constantly improve information technology, standardization and automation levels, and promote the integration of operations and network management. This will result in the development of green logistics, promote energy conservation, and effectively reduce energy consumption, reduce emissions, and ease traffic pressure.


Important principles:
2.  Energy conservation, emission reduction and environmental protection: Encourage the use of energy efficient, environmental protection technologies, equipment and increase the level of organization of logistics work, level of networking, and decrease the overall energy consumption and pollution emission level of the logistics sector.


Development goals:
3.  By 2020, Develop and roll out an appropriate, technologically advanced, convenient and efficient, green and environmentally sound, safe and orderly modern logistics service system.


Major tasks:
4.  Concentrate on Green Logistics Development: Optimize the transportation structure, and make appropriate use of various modes of transport. Increasing rail and waterway transport is important in advancing energy saving and emissions reduction. Concentrate on drop-and-hook logistics, common distribution, unified distribution and other advanced logistics organization modes, improve storage data and informatization, reduce empty trips, and improve backloading. Encourage the use of low energy consumption, low emissions transport tools and energy efficient, green warehousing infrastructure, promote containerization technology. Taking into consideration advanced international experience, perfect energy consumption and emissions testing and certification, and accelerate the construction of a green logistics evaluation standard and certification system. Strengthen hazardous materials waterway transport, and reduce to the greatest degree possible environmental accidents. Encourage packaging reuse and recycling, improve the level of the recirculation of standardized items such as pallets and packaging, resulting in a low environmental load, cyclical logistics system. Concentrate on the development of recycling logistics, encourage producers and companies that use recycled materials to jointly develop the recycling of old products. Promote the use of dust-reduction technology in transport of bulk goods by rail.


Major projects:
5.  Urban-rural Logistics Distribution Project: …Promote urban green freight distribution system construction, perfect urban distribution vehicle standards and operation management measures, encourage the use of energy saving, environmentally sound vehicles in urban distribution applications. Accelerate modern logistics pilot cities and distribution system development, build up franchise operators and online sales company inter-regional distribution centers. Develop smart logistics bases, support rural, community, school logistics express pick up and delivery centers. Encourage transportation, post, trade, marketing and supply, publishing, etc. to develop alliances and cooperation and make integrated use of existing logistics resources, advance the perfection of basic infrastructure for storage, intermodal, docking, unloading, strengthen service network construction, increase common delivery abilities.


For more information, please contact Robert Earley at rob.earley[at]cleanairasia.org