August 6, 2020
Stord is thrilled to announce our partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency as a SmartWay Logistics Company, just a few months since expanding our freight capabilities. An EPA SmartWay partnership provides us with the gold standard of emissions calculating tools for sustainability accounting.
It is no secret supply chains are a majority contributor to enterprise carbon footprints. An average CPG shipper’s supply chain is responsible for 90% of its companies’ damages to the environment and 80% of its greenhouse emissions. Freight transportation is the culprit that makes up a vast majority of air pollutants and emissions in the US.
While many companies actively report on direct emissions from and around manufacturing operations, indirect emissions consist of a much broader range of activities and are a significant contributor to the overall carbon footprint. Freight transportation is often a huge part of indirect emissions that go un-tracked. The SmartWay program provides a structured process for tracking, documenting, and benchmarking logistics’ carbon footprint across the entire supply chain including freight.
SmartWay Transport Partners include Fortune 500 companies, small and medium-sized shippers, multimodal international carriers, and full service logistics providers like Stord. A variety of data is pooled from these parties using SmartWay tools including indirect emissions data (CO2, NOx, and PM), fuel use, freight backhaul logs, and more. As a shipper, this data is necessary to develop industry benchmarks for carbon footprint. Additionally, data from logistics suppliers and carriers encourage shippers to choose efficient providers who work to not only reduce fuel use and emissions but lower costs around the movement of goods.
Designing a more sustainable supply chain
Built for the long term, Stord recognizes the massive undertaking shippers have in achieving their sustainability goals and is well-positioned to support a variety of environmental initiatives. The nature of our Networked Distribution model has already lent itself to this, but our SmartWay partnership increases our ability to support shippers as they track and reduce supply chain carbon footprint. Here are a few of the ways Stord can help:
- Transportation Optimization: Track and reduce freight fuel and emissions, optimize transportation routes/backhauls, source environmentally-friendly trucks, air, and ocean freight carriers including electric last-mile delivery.
- Warehouse Network Design: Optimize distribution so warehouses are up to 60% closer to customers, track and reduce warehouse emissions, and source environmentally-friendly warehouses including solar-powered or carbon-neutral facilities.
- Technology: Good analytics and reporting are smaller changes that can have equally large impacts. Stord’s platform connects shippers’ warehouses with their ERP to consolidate data in one location. Track inventory in real time to avoid inventory overflows and stock-outs which both have negative environmental impacts because they leave you with either a large, temporary expansion of footprint or idle warehouse space.
- Data Science: Our best in class data science team uses shipment and order data to run network optimization reports, lane shift analyses, pool distribution models and more to find redundant or missing facilities and/or transportation lanes. Know that your supply chain is operating at peak performance without creating any excess waste.
Ultimately, any reduction in waste has a positive impact on both the environment and your company's bottom line. At Stord, we help shippers solve their most complex supply chain challenges while leaving a positive, lasting impact on customers, partners, employees, and now the environment. We are excited to leverage our EPA SmartWay Logistics Partnership to support shippers as they take on high-impact environmental initiatives around their supply chains.