Pilots selected for Econnections

Upscaling innovation programme for sustainable projects

Innovation programme Econnections joins together bol.com, Deloitte, Google Cloud, IKEA Nederland, Mollie and PostNL to accelerate sustainability in e-commerce. In a first step, these partners will collaborate with several proven innovative scale-up companies in a range of pilot projects. These projects have now been selected.

Liesbeth Kaashoek, PostNL’s Parcels and Logistics Director, commented: “Econnections will be collaborating with seven carefully selected scale-ups. The selected pilot projects are looking very promising and we’re really happy to provide expertise, investment and networks to help these players grow further and together take steps to make e-commerce more sustainable.”

Econnections: how it works

These scale-up companies each offer proven solutions that match the challenges facing one of these partners. Solutions that help companies and consumers to make more sustainable choices, for instance, to enable emissions-free delivery of parcels, create sustainable packaging or extend product life cycles. All these pilot projects address challenges across the e-commerce supply chain, from manufacturers to online retailers, parcel deliverers and consumers, and including inventory management, packaging, shipping and returns.

More on pilots

The scale-ups will get stuck into a series of real-world projects at partners bol.com, IKEA Nederland and PostNL. Technology and innovation leaders Deloitte, Google Cloud and Mollie are committing their expertise in growth strategy, technology, and implementation and upscaling of innovations.

• Chargetrip optimises route planning for electric vehicles (EVs), facilitating product deliveries in the best possible and most sustainable way.
• Returnless works to reduce returns by making their processing more efficient.
• Optiply's integrated AI solution is being tested to optimise inventories and product top-ups for e-commerce customers.
• Greenplan's planning software is being trialled to help improve planning performance with the aim of reducing the number of kilometres driven, and so also carbon emissions.
• One key way to reduce a company’s environmental footprint is to cut plastic polybag packaging, which is often used for external packaging when sending products. PlasticFri provides a sustainable alternative.
• Drop & Loop is searching for solutions to reduce textile waste.
• Manyfolds is focusing its efforts on a tailored packaging solution for fragile articles to help reduce damage and returns.

The partner organisations are helping these new and green scale-ups to grow, and so accelerate sustainability across the entire e-commerce chain.