Royal Mail has opened its state-of-the-art Midlands Super Hub in Daventry, UK, marking the event with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, a special performance and a visit by the local member of parliament.
The 21.5ha site – the equivalent of 30 soccer pitches – is now Royal Mail’s largest automated parcels facility. It can process up to 90,000 items an hour, with each parcel taking just seven minutes to pass through the sorting machines. With its sister Super Hub in the North West, it gives Royal Mail business an interconnected, market-leading parcels network that stretches right across the UK.
Royal Mail’s chief operations officer, Grant McPherson, said, “This is a very exciting time for Royal Mail. The opening of this Super Hub is a key part of our journey to revolutionize our parcels business.
“We’ve now created a state-of-the-art network of Super Hubs that processes parcels at incredible speeds, has the transport links to ship them efficiently across the UK, and fulfills the needs of our customers for a reliable parcels business that will deliver for them the next day, every day of the week. It’s truly an investment in the future and puts us on track to meet our mission to reduce our carbon emissions.”
The new facility was built from the ground up with the environment in mind. The building is energy efficient, harvests rainwater and generates its own solar electricity. It is on the doorstep of several of the nation’s major online retailers, allowing these companies to drop off parcels at the latest-possible time for next-day delivery.
One of the site’s major features is its integrated rail link and dedicated Royal Mail train connecting the Super Hub to the West Coast Mainline, Britain’s primary rail route. It runs from the hub to the firm’s Scottish distribution center near Glasgow.
The use of the train will take up to 16 Royal Mail trucks off the road every day, more than 3,000 a year. All of this contributes to Royal Mail’s Steps to Zero campaign – a drive to reduce the business’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2040.
Combined with Royal Mail’s other operations, the Super Hub will contribute to efforts ongoing locally and nationally to drive quality across the board and give customers a consistently reliable service.
FACTS:
- The entire site is 21.5ha – the equivalent of 30 soccer pitches
- 120,000 tons of concrete were used in the construction of the site
- The volume of the unit is 1.3 million cubic meters – large enough for 14 jumbo jets
- The steel frame of the unit weighs 4,500 tons
- 235 million parcels will pass through the hub each year, up to 90k per hour
- There will be 1,600 vehicles in and out of the hub daily
- The site is next to the warehouses and fulfillment centers of several major online retailers
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