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| HYBRID THEORY: Tony Hormillosa and his partners are finding out what green can do for them. photography by Joshua Martin |
Anyone who has been married for any length of time knows you can’t say no to your wife. It’s generally best just to say yes and save the time and the drama. That’s how Tony Hormillosa ended up starting his own business, Go Green Couriers. Sort of.
Hormillosa has been involved in the courier business, in one way or another, for more than 16 years. But until Go Green Couriers opened its doors on August 4, he had always been an independent contractor. That changed when his wife Shashana suggested he buy a hybrid vehicle, since he was driving more than 200 miles a day.
“It made sense to her from an environmental and economic perspective, but as a commissioned courier, upgrading to a hybrid was not cost-efficient,” Hormillosa says. “The only way I could do it was to start my own courier service.”
That idea got some traction last December when, while talking with some bike messenger friends downtown, one suggested he start a green courier service and call it Go Green Couriers to piggyback on the city’s Green Dallas initiative. Hormillosa started researching the idea. He found the only other green courier company in the country (Atlanta’s Green Express). And he found he could do a lot of good. “The statistics were alarming,” Hormillosa says. For example: one courier driving a standard gasoline vehicle releases 33 tons of carbon emissions a year.
Using only hybrid vehicles and only bikes in the Central Business District—“There is no reason a car of any kind should be delivering small packages from one building to another,” Hormillosa says—Go Green Couriers can offset other courier companies’ emissions by 17 to 30 tons a year per car. The company (owned and operated by Hormillosa, his brother Robb, and friends Alex Ham and Robert Lelievre) also reduced its carbon footprint by eliminating one shoebox altogether.
“There is no need to waste energy by having an office space,” Hormillosa says. “We automate all the operational functions of the business through a comprehensive dispatching software. I can receive and dispatch orders anywhere I’m at in the city.”
