An investigation into a sustainable AMS food delivery system
Creators: name: Cheng, Kong
name: Jiang, Xuan
name: Meysamifard, Mohammad
name: Petersen, Kevin
Publisher: name: The University of British Columbia
Year: 2015

description: The new SUB at UBC will be completed December 2014 and is attempting to achieve LEED Platinum certification, a title given to the most sustainable buildings in the world. Not only should this certification refer to the materials used to construct the building and the construction process itself, but it should also influence the operations of the building and its businesses. The current delivery system used by AMS Food and Beverage to transport food throughout the campus is a gasoline powered vehicle. The primary stakeholder for this project, Collyn Chan, the sustainability coordinator of the new SUB, is concerned with the carbon emission of this vehicle and is requesting a recommendation for a more environmentally friendly vehicle to replace the current food delivery vehicle. This task is being investigated by a group of students currently enrolled in APSC 262, whom will determine an environmentally friendly vehicle option that can suitably serve as a food delivery vehicle for AMS Food and Beverage. This report describes a TBL analysis to evaluate which environmentally friendly vehicle would be the most suitable option as a delivery vehicle for AMS Food and Beverage. The three vehicle options compared in this report are a manual bicycle, a fully electric scooter and a fully electric car. Through the TBL analysis, the environmental, economic and social impacts associated with each vehicle’s capability to deliver food were compared. Additionally, the stakeholder also required that the vehicle recommendation be able to travel across campus in a timely manner, protect the deliverer and the food cargo from Vancouver’s weather throughout the entire calendar year and be able to carry at least 100 boxes of pizza in one trip. Only vehicles which were deemed to be relatively environmentally friendly and that met the constraints listed by the project stakeholder were considered in the TBL analysis; any other options were ruled out in a primary stage of the investigation. The result of the TBL analysis of the vehicle options considered determined that a fully electric car, such as the Smart Fortwo Electric Drive, or the Nissan Leaf 2014 SV, would be ideal for delivering food items throughout campus. The recommendation given by this report is that AMS Food and Beverage should replace their current gasoline powered food delivery vehicle with more environmentally friendly fully electric vehicles. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”