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Comment by the-dude | Hacker News Reader

In The Netherlands, DHL uses bikes : http://www.dhl.com/en/press/releases/releases_2014/express/d...

I absolutely hate DHL as a recipient in NL, but this is pretty cool. They have other green vehicles too ( gas, electric ).

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The Swiss Postal service has a similar fleet of vehicles ranging from hybrid, gas and electric.

https://www.post.ch/-/media/post/ueber-uns/medienmitteilunge...

https://www.post.ch/de/ueber-uns/unternehmen/medien/medienmi...

What do you think about the Picnic delivery trucks?

Background: I work at Picnic, an online supermarket in the Netherlands, and we have a large fleet of small electric trucks for delivering in cities and neighborhoods.

https://i.imgur.com/Howtq17.jpg

how is gas green?

Low emissions.

The alternative IC engine is typically diesel and spews lots of carcinogenic particles and compounds.

You may have a point. It burns cleaner ( liquified natural gas ).

Maybe they meant natural gas (actual gas) rather than the liquid fuel we call "gas" as short for "gasoline".

Biogas can be generated by fermenting sewage. All buses in Stockholm run on it, it burns extremely clean and is carbon-neutral since it utilizes carbon already in the present carbon cycle.

All yeast strains produce some amount of hydrogen sulfide during fermentation as a by-product of sulfate processing. [1]

You can barely call that biogas "burns extremely clean" with hydrogen sulfide in them, can you?

[1]: https://beerandbrewing.com/off-flavor-of-the-week-sulfur/

Sorry, bad choice words. The work is not done by a yeast so perhaps it’s not technically fermenting. The work is done by a type of bacteria called archea. As far as I know the only byproduct Upon burning biogas is CO2 and water vapor.

I rode my push bike from Portland to Cheyenne, WY. I figure I burnt 10,000 calories a day.The environmental cost of logistics of growing and shipping that many human consumable calories probably drastically out weighs that of burning gas in a car to travel that distance. Maybe someone can do the math.

It depends on what those calories are. If you're eating inexpensive veggies/fruits/starches/grains, you're probably around 200-300mpg equivalent on a bike. If you're eating steaks, then you're probably pretty close to a car.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/mpg-of-a-human/

You're doing a lot worse than that if you're hauling mail around.

The numbers also get a lot worse once you consider the energy cost of shipping your food to you (as both your article and the person you were responding to noted).

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