I wanted to summarise some of the things we’ve discovered in one place because I’m certain you’d love to hear about them too:
In a recent roundtable with our colleagues at Unleashed, our integration partner, Starlinks Global shared how they try to ensure carbon emissions during cross-border shipping are at a minimum. Beth Chapman, Managing Director said:
“Because we're a cross border carrier, we have to put stuff on airplanes, so ultimately we will be creating a carbon footprint - those parcels do create a carbon footprint, but there's a number of things that we do because we have a moral and environmental responsibility.
By our exceptions process and by driving down the undeliverables - one of our retailers that had a 10% undeliverable rate, their undeliverable rate with us now is 0.35%. So we've made a really positive contribution to reducing their carbon footprint because we're not flying parcels around the world, for them to just then have to come all the way back again as an undeliverable and then all the energy that also is going to use in reprocessing them back in.”
Unleashed customer Candy Kittens discuss how reducing their packaging has a knock on effect to reduce the relative road miles they’re goods travel. Dan Hayward, Operations Director said:
“With B Corp, we have to recertify every three years, and the challenge with that is you can't just stand still. What we want as a business is to be recertifying as a B Corp because of the work that we're doing, rather than doing the work because we want to recertify as a B-Corp. I think that's also really important as a business to be focusing and have it as part of your business agenda, that ESG is really important and it's not just a tick box exercise.
From a fulfilment side of things, we've done some really great work over the last couple of years - we reduced 25% of the plastic in our pouches. And what that actually allowed us to do was to increase our palletisation by 42%, which was incredible and has really allowed us to step change our B2B fulfilment in terms of the road miles that we've taken off or the relative road miles as a growing brand.”
Hear more from the expert panel from the Optimising Supply Chain Fulfilment roundtable.
In recent interviews with 2 of our customers, they explained how they are positivity contributing to the effort to minimise carbon emissions:
Operations Director of Green Fulfilment, Cain Fleming said:
“We're able to calculate the carbon emissions from start to finish, from when it leaves the building to the end recipient, what's the estimated carbon for that shipment, and we're able to report that back to the end customer.
That really helped us with becoming a B Corp and becoming B Corp certified. Being able to measure scope one, two and three emissions is key for us and key for the country in terms of business in general because we want to drive down carbon emissions overall.”
Watch the full interview with Green Fulfilment.
Director of Radius Warehouse and Logistics Services, Alex Large, said in a recent interview:
“Since we’ve moved, our new facility is a far greener site - it helps us with our carbon emissions, which in turn as an extension of the companies that we work with, that helps them with their final carbon emission output that they have.
Everything we have on site is electric. It's a great A++ rated building and one of the key things for us when moving, was that there were key requirements for us with regards to what we were doing. Simple things, like none of our waste going off to landfill and everything had to be fully recycled, but nonetheless, small changes like that are very important for everyone, and if we all make these small changes, it makes a big difference.”
Watch the full interview with Radius Warehouse and Logistics Services.