Green Worldwide Shipping®, a leader in international freight forwarding and global trade solutions, recently had the pleasure of attending several online events focusing on sustainable business practices. A few growing trends, including calculating baseline emissions and the practice of “insetting”, garnered attention at both the Net-Zero-Carbon-Summit, hosted by Freight Waves, and the National Retail Federation’s event, Cracking the Code on Carbon Footprinting.
CARBON CALCULATING
The most natural, and perhaps most necessary place to start, with regards to green business initiatives, is reducing carbon emissions. Many corporate leaders touched on the need to understand where greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are produced within their organization and its supply chain, and to what extent those contaminations are affecting the environment. This is essentially how businesses begin to calculate their baseline footprint and develop goals set to minimize their impact.
Indirect emissions, produced by a company’s supply chain, are one of the more difficult output sources to measure, due to them being controlled by a number of outside partners. These GHG releases, however, can represent a significant part of a corporation’s overall carbon footprint, therefore, many firms choose to partner with third parties to obtain accurate data, based on their respective industry standards.
During these conferences, freight providers, as well as business consultants, spoke about offering tools to calculate transportation-related pollutants and highlight key performance indicators in line with their customers’ corporate goals. Pointing out straightforward solutions such as consolidation, which can help to reduce empty miles, provides businesses a shipment-by-shipment look at how their existing procedures impact their overall footprint.
CARBON OFFSET VS. INSET VS. REDUCTION
Once armed with the knowledge provided by calculating an organization’s baseline GHG output, the next step is to consider what to do about it.
Carbon offset programs, which involve financially supporting unconnected environmental projects, have been the popular approach to this issue in the past and are still a viable, cost-effective, and convenient solution for firms implementing climate-conscious industry practices. An argument made by some business leaders, however, is that investing solely in offsetting is no longer enough.
“Carbon Insetting” which is gaining popularity, differs from offsetting in that funding from corporations goes directly toward sustainable practices within their immediate supply chain, rather than a remote, or external program.
For example, apparel brands may choose to endorse the implementation of regenerative farming practices directly from where they source their cotton. With regards to logistics providers, freight carriers, and shippers, insetting can involve monetarily supporting the decarbonization of the transportation industry.
Neither offsetting nor insetting refutes the need for carbon reductions, of course. Companies that are dedicated to championing sustainability as a core value must also put their focus toward renewable energy sources, recyclable product materials, and alternative fuel options.
The unconventional substitutes for fuel which were mentioned often at these events were both renewable natural gas (RNG), which is extracted from methane in landfills and farm waste, and hydrogen, which currently poses delivery challenges as it must be kept extremely cold.
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