The Weight of Carbon in Product Delivery

With expanding eco awareness in the supply chain, companies are taking a hard look at environmental impact and business risk across the entire value chain. Forward thinking organizations, like Wal-Mart, are placing business sustainability improvements back into the hands of their suppliers to reduce the impacts of supply. However, inbound logistics represent only half of the business sustainability challenge.

An equally impactful yet sometimes more difficult opportunity for a company to explore is the management of its outbound logistics and distribution processes. As the business world actively pursues improvements in the supply chain, a few companies are capturing lessons from the retail distributors and taking an active role in managing their own warehousing and delivery. These efforts are focused on creating efficient, cost-effective, and minimal impact distribution systems.

One challenge facing distribution change is its recent history. Business over the last few decades has primarily focused on cost efficiency or accelerated delivery value as the two primary drivers in distribution. The result has caused a divergence of cost from impact, as high emission transportation has come to dominate today’s freight and end-product delivery.

Working with both large and small businesses to evaluate the future business risk of carbon, our sustainability consulting stresses the need to develop process of policies to address sustainable distribution practices across all freight transport modes as part of a business sustainability program. Components of a sustainable distribution strategy might include:

•    Sustainable approach to product distribution.
•    Integrated transport philosophy coordinating all transportation modes.
•    Openness to explore alternative transportation.
•    Aligned values with freight and end-customer delivery partners.

Current distribution systems rely heavily on the use of air and truck delivery. These transportation modes come with significant environmental and social touch points.   Taiga Company encourages its clients to evaluate all options in both their inbound and outbound processes.