Globalisation, urbanisation and the recent COVID-19 pandemic has been raising the demand for logistic activities. This change is affecting the entire supply chain, especially the last-mile step. This step is considered the most expensive and ineffective part of the supply chain and a source of negative economic, environmental and social externalities. This article aims to characterise the sustainable urban last-mile logistics research field through a systematic literature review (N = 102). This wide and holistic review was organised into six thematic clusters that identified the main concepts addressed in the different areas of the last-mile research and the existence of 14 solutions, grouped into three types (vehicular, operational, and organisational solutions). The major findings are that there are no ideal last-mile solutions as their limitations should be further explored by considering the so-called “triple bottom line of sustainability”; the integration and combination of multiple last-mile alternative concepts; or by establishing collaboration schemes that minimise the stakeholders’ conflicting interests.

E-commerce growth is driving the need for novel, more sustainable last-mile delivery strategies. One potential strategy is based on setting up a mobile-depot from where last-mile deliveries are conducted using cargo bikes. This research explores the impacts of this strategy through a microscopic traffic simulation based on a medium-sized European city. The strategy was evaluated at three levels: operational (route length and duration), energy consumption, and emissions. The results showed that adopting a last-mile delivery strategy based on a mobile-depot and cargo bikes leads to significant benefits in terms of energy consumption and emission, which decrease by more than 80 %, but imply lengthier (+49 %) and more time-consuming (+14 %) routes compared to a traditional parcel delivery strategy.