Blog · Europe · 19 May 2026
About one in five truck kilometres in Europe is driven with nothing on board. Each of those empty miles still burns diesel, still emits carbon, still pays a driver, still wears down the asset. It just earns nothing and serves no one. Multiply that across a fleet and the waste stops being a rounding error and becomes a line on the P&L.
The empty mile is not a driver's failing. It is a design flaw in the network. A truck runs light because the next load sits somewhere else, or because the booking system at each end of the trip never spoke to the other. Fix the matching problem and the empty miles start to vanish on their own.
Density is the lever that does it. The more freight a network carries across overlapping lanes, the easier it is to marry an outbound delivery to a return load. Our regional planning desks treat backhaul as a primary booking goal, not a happy accident — and the carbon savings track the cost savings almost line for line.
For the customer it lands as a lower rate and a lighter footprint on the very same shipment. We report avoided empty kilometres next to delivered tonnes, because the greenest mile in freight is the one a truck never had to run empty.
