HUNDREDS more vans have flooded Ceredigion’s roads in recent years due to the rise of online shopping.

Retailers have been urged to reduce the number of diesel vans they use to make deliveries, and make more effort to switch their fleets of vehicles to cleaner sources of fuel.

Since 2012, 862 more vans have been registered in Ceredigion - nearly all of them powered by diesel. In total, 7,711 vans are registered in the area, an increase of more than 10 per cent.

The increase in vans has vastly outpaced the growth in the number of cars in Ceredigion since 2012, as people increasingly shop from the comfort of their sofas. There are three per cent more cars on the road.

In 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, vans covered a distance of 49.1 billion miles on Britain’s roads - an increase of 19 per cent on 2012. Car miles increased by just five per cent in the same period.

But the convenience comes at a cost, with increasingly poor air quality having an impact on public health and the environment.

This week, a new clean air strategy published by government was branded “hugely disappointing” by the Labour party, which said it did little to tackle diesel pollution.

Oliver Hayes, clean air campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “Only a very small proportion of vans on our roads are low emission models, with the vast majority releasing clouds of toxic diesel fumes onto streets across the UK.

“The online shopping world is largely dominated by a few e-commerce giants, the rise of which has been at the expense of our air quality as well as high street businesses."

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