Companies have begun measuring their supply chains with economic, environmental, and social benefits in mind.

Supply chain management has always been about moving goods while accumulating efficiencies, but in the age of “green” logistics a growing number of executives are taking a closer look at the tangential benefits of their decisions.

Where a decade ago the phrase on everyone’s lips was “just-in-time,” today, more likely than not, you’re bound to run into a colleague talking about the “triple bottom line,” or that sweet spot where supply chain initiatives have economic, environmental, and social benefits.

And, while the scale of activity varies considerably, what’s clear is how fully a wide range of players have embraced the challenge of achieving what they once might have seen as competing goals.

Whether they work for a 3PL, a forwarder, trucking firm, railroad or industrial property developer, each of the executives represented in the following companies has been sifting through all manner of operations and applying solutions they hope will reduce their carbon footprint while delivering a tangible return on investment.

Two attributes these efforts share is that in each case environmental aims have been achieved by simply doing business “better” and with more of an eye on detail.




 

A hydrogen fuel cell experiment

Genco Supply Chain Solutions has been advising client Kimberly Clark Corp. on supply chain processes for years.

But when it came to proposing the consumer product giant switch from batteries to hydrogen fuel cells to power the lift trucks in its 450,000 square-foot distribution center in Graniteville, S.C., the change initially seemed like a non-starter, recalls Peter Rector, executive vice president of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based 3PL.

“We understood the benefits of hydrogen fuel cells-that they run at full power until all the hydrogen is gone (a big productivity boost), and that their ‘emissions’ consist of a little heat and pure water that evaporates into the air-but financially, it just didn’t make sense,” Rector says.

The problem was the cost (of the fuel cells), which was significantly compounded by the cost of transporting hydrogen to recharge them, and in turn amounted to about eight or nine times the cost of the batteries they were meant to replace.

Then the federal government announced a generous subsidy administered by the U.S. Department of Energy intended to support companies interested in exploring alternative energy as a way of getting off the grid.

“It was almost like a ‘Eureka’ moment,” Rector says. “We went to them and said, ‘This is a great green project, a great productivity project, and financially, thanks to the DOE, it makes sense as well.’ They said, ‘Thanks a lot guys. We absolutely agree. Let’s do it.’”

That started Kimberly Clark’s hydrogen fuel cell experiment. In the two-and-a-half years since, Genco has purchased 25 hydrogen fuel cell power units, and the initiative has even begun to expand beyond the gates of its client’s facility.

“Basically, we began by testing the concept on a very modest level, looking at it from the standpoint of both the environment and the bottom line,” Rector explains.

In practice, that meant assessing how well the outcomes fell within the intersection of the three “standardized circles” of doing business, he says.

“Everything we do in sustainability, we gauge by these circles,” says Rector. “We ask ourselves, ‘Is it economically sound?’ ‘Is it environmentally good?’ and finally, ‘Is it socially responsible?’”

Expanding on that thought, Rector defines the answers to those criteria.

“With the environment, obviously, the goal you want to reach is reducing your carbon footprint,” he says. “Socially? Well, it’s a matter of benefiting the community in which you’re located, whether that means providing more local jobs or simply taking care of the place in which you live and work.”

“Finally, the third criteria, is does the initiative make good financial sense?” he asks. “If it costs you more money, that begs the question about the long term sustainability of what you’re doing.”

Rector says the fuel cell initiative in South Carolina helped Kimberly Clark reduce its demand for electricity and thereby produced a significant energy cost savings. At the same time, use of the fuel cells has substantially reduced greenhouse gas emissions within the distribution center and removed toxic lead-acid from the workplace.

The initiative has also had a surprising side effect-it inspired both a neighboring distribution center operated by the Bridgestone Tire Company, and Aiken County, S.C. itself, to also embrace the use of hydrogen fuel cells.

“What’s happened is, as result of our program and a similar initiative at the Bridgestone facility, Aiken County has established a hydrogen fuel station between us which will supply us both with fuel via dedicated pipe lines,” Rector says. “And, their intent down the road is to start converting some of their county vehicles to hydrogen power as well.

“That’s an example, I guess, of the multiplier effect of sustainability initiatives,” he continues. “As more and more of these ‘local’ collaborations come online, you’ll slowly build a network of fueling stations and eventually there will be enough of these things to make it practical to drive long distances with them.”

Rector cites shareholder pressure as one of the prime drivers of sustainable initiatives; that, and the belief that some kind of regulatory regime will eventually be put in place to “penalize companies that pollute and don’t care.”

But another significant factor is the influence of consumer values and choice. “In a very real sense, embracing green is a way to enhance your competitive advantage,” he notes. “Kimberly Clark realizes that, as does Unilever, for whom we do a lot of distribution work.

“From their perspective, if it costs them an additional half-cent to make another bar of soap, that’s okay, compared to the gains they get in market share from having a green supply chain,” he says.

Rector explains that much of the work Genco and Unilever have done together revolves around reducing the amount of packaging that goes into each shipment-a goal that reduces the weight of individual products while increasing the number of items that can be shipped on each truck or in each container.

“Johnson & Johnson, another of our clients, has taken similar steps, and they’ve also incorporated transportation initiatives into the mix through which they’ve cut millions of miles from their supply chains through smarter routing, fuller trucks, and better load balancing among distribution facilities using technologies,” he says.

According to Rector, the key to keeping the green momentum going is seeing every conversation with a potential client as an opportunity to think about and present a host of sustainable alternatives.

“Again, it comes down to those three spheres I talked about earlier, and what we’ll do in a design meeting is offer several alternatives within the three,” he says. “We’ll say, ‘Okay, here’s the 21st Century solution, and this is what it’ll take to implement it.’ It could be anything, a simple thing.

“For instance, if you’re going to build a facility, we might say, ‘Consider installing LED exit lights on the facility,’ or ‘incorporate sky lights and compact florescent lighting,’ and ‘maybe you should consider water usage and install waterless urinals.’ Everything adds up, and people are less frightened by small or incremental measures.

“Then, as with any other initiative, you come up with measurements and benchmarks that make sense and allow us to figure out how to get better over time,” Rector says.

The final step in promulgating “green” is giving the client a line of sight on the return on investment.

“That’s all the more encouraging,” Rector sums up.




 

Art as green inspiration

Mike Ellis, President of EA Logistics, said the inspiration for his Chicago-based company’s embrace of “green” was a local art project for which the freight forwarder donated transportation services.

“The project was called Cool Globes, and its focus was on providing businesses, individuals, and institutions with practical ways to mitigate their environmental impacts as relates to global warming,” he says.

“After our involvement in that, I jut felt that it was time for us to really get serious about sustainability and to find common sense solutions in our own business,” Ellis adds.

 In EA Logistics’ case those good intentions led to creation of its trademarked Delivered GrEAn initiative, which mandates the use of biodiesel in its own truck fleet, (while encouraging vendors to do the same), enforces no-idling restrictions at its facility, and requires drivers to comply with delivery truck speed rules to reduce fuel consumption.

Ellis said deciding what to prioritize was a multi-faceted process.

“Number one, you look internally at your own business operations, your facilities, your processes and your people,” he says. “And we did that while concurrently looking at the end product of our business, which is the transportation of freight from point A to point B.

“To do it any other way would have been hypocritical,” Ellis continues. “You can’t just do the transportation piece. You have to look in-house at your own operations.”

Among the interesting aspects of EA Logistics’ approach is that they tackled sustainability without the help of consultants.

“The thing about greening your operations is that once you learn a little bit about it, the low-hanging fruit becomes obvious,” Ellis says. “So it was a process of self-education for us and most of all, it was a matter of common sense. For example, once you start thinking about reducing your carbon footprint, you logically come to certain conclusions. And, it’s not rocket science.”

Among the specific steps that EA Logistics took to make itself more green was switching the company-owned fleet of trucks to biodiesel, improving the aerodynamics of trucks used for even local deliveries, and retrofitting its Chicago warehouse with energy and water efficient lighting and fixtures.

“The most important thing we do is help clients achieve their desired transportation solution by utilizing the most efficient and least costly modes of transport, which generally speaking means steering them toward rail and truck, versus air.

“In short, we help our customers make modal shifts that benefit their bottom line as well as improve their carbon footprint,” he says.

In short order, EA Logistics was offering its clients a wide range of green services, ranging from computing the carbon footprints of their operations, to providing reforestation offsets to neutralize their emission profile. In fact, Ellis said making the case for green to his clients was easy.

“The beauty of a more green form of transportation is that it is generally cheaper and generally more efficient, and while efficiency is not a very sexy word, when you look at a reduction of our carbon impact, efficiency is where it’s at,” he says.

“And I think ultimately, those savings to the client, the shipper, are what’s going to make this more than a trend or a fad,” Ellis adds.

As for EA Logistics’ reforestation efforts, Ellis said they boil down to being “the most ethical way to address an imperfect system.”

“As green as this industry is becoming, the reality is we know we are doing damage with transport, but we can’t not transport stuff,” he says. “It’s a fundamental aspect of human economic activity and human existence. So if you are going to create emissions, if you can do some good in a way that’s proportional to those emissions, why wouldn’t you do that?

“Of course, offsets are not a perfect solution; the perfect solution is to reduce emissions,” Ellis says. “But some emissions just can’t be reduced yet. My hope is that we can get some kind of price on carbon so that we can spur the innovation that the American business community is so great at, to find creative ways to reduce carbon emissions even further.”




 

The early stages of the green revolution

When Appian Logistics was founded back in 1987, “green” wasn’t even on the radar.

As James Stevenson recalls, he and his colleagues at Appian Logistics were most concerned with creating software that enhanced the dispatching and routing of cargo deliveries, and then with developing a series of back office benchmarking processes to assess their progress against.

“There’s no question, the driving force behind our software was optimization,” says Stevenson, the company’s vice president.

“It was about taking certain processes away from the dispatchers-like taking tickets and so forth-with the idea to clean up internal business processes while reducing the amount of equipment our clients dedicated to serving specific routes.”

Measures that are today considered the height of sustainability were then merely tools intended to reduce costs or handle a specific internal business problem.

“What’s evolved over time is this idea that doing things greener also means doing things smarter,” Stevenson says. “You’re still reducing costs because much of what you’re implementing involves optimization, but now people are talking more about reducing the carbon footprint of their fleet and those kinds of goals, which happily are a byproduct of streamlining routes and processes.”

In fact, software companies as a whole have done quite well during the green revolution, thanks to software being perceived as offering a faster return on investment than other measures, Stevenson says.

“If you’re looking for a green initiative and have ten to pick from, it’s going to be much easier to get a project funded whose return on investment is six months to a year rather than five years,” he explains.

But that doesn’t mean software is always the be-all and end-all. Equally important to fulfilling green goals is having a human charged with assessing how well reality matches up with what’s scaling across the computer screen.

“You have to constantly look at ‘actual’ versus ‘planned,’” Stevenson reminds. “You have to have someone evaluating how well you’re actually performing. If the software says you have a route with 10 stops and its 470 miles, and yet when the driver returns he’s driven 540 miles, there’s obviously a gap there.

“That’s when you have to ask, ‘What did you do that made that difference between real and anticipated mileage?’ ‘Did you take the best route?’” he continues. “It’s great to plan, but if you are not performing to it, then you didn’t really achieve what you had hoped.”

Stevenson says that in his experience, the extent of a logistics company’s embrace of green correlates directly to its size and its resources, something that tends to obscure the idea of how far the trend toward sustainability has gone.

“I think when you see a company like Schneider or UPS or FedEx with their green certified programs, you get the idea that green is pervasive,” he said. “What that really indicates is that they’ve got the size and scope to be looking at the big picture.

“The smaller guys, on the other had-and if you were to add up all the smaller guys, their slice of the logistics and supply chain pie would be far larger than that of the household names-is still much more concerned with survival and the day-to-day running of their business,” Stevenson points out.

As a result, Stevenson believes we’re still in the “early adopter phase” of the green revolution.

“We haven’t hit the big bell curve of it yet,” he says.

So how do you get there?

“Well, I think it’s a progression over time,” Stevenson says. “One thing that would help is to create a situation where the return on investment makes being green the most economical way to operate, no matter how big your business is.

“The other thing that would get us to the thick part of the bell curve is legislative mandates, which would in effect make ‘green’ a cost of doing business,” he continues. “Remember, a lot of green initiatives make perfect sense, but if you’re a guy that just has five trucks and you’re trying to make ends meet, as socially conscious as you may be, you aren’t going to spend money that you are not required to.”




 

A sustainable business model

Trucking firms and 3PLs aren’t the only ones focusing on routing efficiencies. It’s also been a major focus for the Norfolk Southern railroad, according to Blair Wimbush, the rail carrier’s chief sustainability officer.

“What we’ve been pursuing are a lot of infrastructure and capacity improvements that will facilitate the movement of goods and have the related benefit of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation network,” says Wimbush.

Asked for specific examples, Wimbush first points to the recently opened Heartland Corridor, which he said will streamline operations and bring improved efficiency on a route that will start at the Port of Norfolk, continue through the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia, and culminate in Ohio and the Midwest.

“It will allow us to reduce rail miles and accommodate double-stack trains and have the added benefit of setting some of the freight off the highways where it makes sense and at the same time, significantly improve our overall operations,” he says.

The other example Wimbush cites is the Crescent Corridor, which runs north-south from New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia and continues south all the way to New Orleans.

“We’re planning a number of new terminals and also some line improvements along that route, with one of the benefits being the elimination of some congestion at the inland port at Front Royal, Virginia,” he says. “Those improvements, including the addition of a second main line for about five miles through the area, will enhance the throughput and movement of freight without hampering our operations on the main line that goes by there.”

For Wimbush, the phrase “better throughput” is virtually interchangeable with “greener operations,” but he emphasizes that Norfolk Southern’s initiatives don’t end there.

As the railroad plans new intermodal facilities along these routes, it’s also looking at how to make these new facilities as green as possible. In fact, it hopes to have at least three new intermodal yards currently on the drawing board LEED certified after they are completed.

“What that means right now is that we want to have the buildings housed on the terminals to be LEED certified, but we also want to go beyond that,” he says. “Toward that end, we’ve joined the U.S. Green Building Council, so that we could partner with them in coming up with a LEED certification standard for intermodal facilities and terminals.

“At the same time, we’re also working with a group called the Sustainable Sites Initiative to develop a way to get the whole intermodal facility designated ‘green,’” Wimbush continues. “What that means from our perspective is that we will make sure all the buildings on the site are as energy and water efficient as possible, and that our operations at our new terminals will include automatic gates and card readers so that trucks can check in and out efficiently and thereby reduce the amount of idling that takes place in and around the terminal.

“Over the past five to seven years, we’ve already shortened the time that drivers spend at the gates of our existing facilities by something like 20 to 25 minutes,” he adds. “What that means is that they are not sitting there, consuming fuel and needlessly adding emissions to the air, and it is our intention to incorporate this technology into all of our new facilities while retrofitting some of the older ones as well.”

 All of which begs an obvious question-‘Why?’

“There are a lot of reasons,” Wimbush responds. “It starts with the fact that it’s the right thing to do. We use a fair amount of diesel fuel and its in the interest of both the environment and the communities that we serve to use that fuel efficiently, because reducing consumption reduces emissions.

“At the same time, being green makes good business sense because lots of those things that improve or minimize your impact on the environment have economic values; so you work to capture as much of that economic value as you can.

“Basically, it boils down to getting more efficient in our operations, which means we are able to handle more traffic with better service, and our customers appreciate that,” Wimbush adds. “In fact, we’re seeing a lot of them issue requests for proposals that ask, in part, how we move their freight while also positively improving their carbon footprints.”

Wimbush likened the current trend in green to the just-in-time lean supply chain movement of the mid-to-late 1990s.

“At that time, it looked new or faddish, but when you looked at it closely it really was about working smarter and more cost effectively,” he says. “In much the same way, I think once you get past the veneer of green, it just makes sense. I think someday we won’t even think of it as green, but just as the normal way we conduct ourselves in business. People will both demand and expect that you participate with them in being a sustainable business partner.”




 

Looking at embedded carbon

Perhaps no company in the warehousing space has been more tuned into the triple bottom line longer than ProLogis, whose position as owner, manager and/or developer of warehouse and distribution space in 18 countries including the U.S. gives the company a unique appreciation of the concept of embedded carbon in the construction process.

“It really is something that we first began looking at in the United Kingdom, where the conversation and regulation regarding sustainability is a little further advanced than it is here in the United States,” said Sarah Martinez, ProLogis’ sustainability analyst.

Also influential were the efforts of consumer brands, like Lay’s Potato Chips and Colorado’s own New Belgium beer, who released high profile studies a few years back detailing the carbon footprint, respectively, of a single bag of potato chips and a six pack of beer.

“Those kinds of things were helping to stimulate the green conversation, and as more companies started to do this, we wanted to do the same,” Martinez says.

ProLogis quickly discovered that undertaking such an effort would require a lot of collaboration with its supply chain.

“Our business model is real estate development; we don’t do construction,” Martinez explains. “We do the planning, but everything else is contracted out. We don’t operate the cranes or ship materials to the site. So as a result, we had to work closely with our contractors, who thankfully, were as excited about the project as we were and collected most of the measurements for us.”

To begin to understand the amount of carbon that is embedded in a distribution center project, ProLogis and its contractors first looked at the products they were utilizing in the building.

“For instance, we looked at the lifecycle of steel beams to be used in the building, looking at everything from mining the iron from the earth to turning it into steel to shipping it to the site,” Martinez says. “Then we looked at the carbon associated with the actual construction activity, things like how much fuel all the equipment on site was using.”

Details of the examination even extended to the construction workers’ commutes, which were carefully logged and tabulated.

Finally, ProLogis did a lifecycle analysis of buildings in the works, looking at the energy required to take them down at the end of their useful life, and what percentage of materials could be recycled.

“[Our efforts in the UK] to this point have really been about data gathering,” Martinez says. “They’ve been about getting people to dedicate their time and sharing information, although on a couple of the projects we did go a step further, working with steel and concrete suppliers and getting them to either offset the embedded carbon in their processes or getting them to use a higher percentage of recycled content in their products.

“In the UK, a lot of suppliers were pretty willing to work with us on that, and I think the level of awareness of the issue there helped us achieve that level of buy-in. Would we have the same result here in the U.S.? That I don’t know,” she admits.

Nonetheless, Martinez does believe there’s reason to be encouraged about the future of green.

“Most of the customers for whom we did these projects had very strong sustainability programs of their own, and they were primarily consumer-facing brands, meaning they were retail organizations with a lot of visibility for both their company and their operations,” she says.

“So their efforts are a little more exposed, if you will,” Martinez continues. “As a result-and I think this will probably carry over here-they were very concerned with the message their activities and philosophy communicated to the public.

“I mean, it went so far as them wanting to be able to say that they stored and distributed their goods from a carbon-neutral shell,” she says. “And that didn’t have anything to do with operations-they literally wanted to offset all of the embedded carbon that remained in the structure. That’s pretty progressive.

“Now, I’m not going to claim all of our customers are on the same page,” Martinez says. “It would be great if they were, but we are not there yet.”

Unfortunately, ProLogis was only in the early stages of getting that answer when the global economic crisis effectively froze commercial development in its tracks.

“We were seeing a lot of interest in green building, energy efficiency, and LEED certification, but we were just beginning data collection when the floor fell out of the economy,” Martinez remarks. “When we stopped building, the U.S. version of our embedded carbon study stopped along with it, although we fully intend to restart it as soon as building resumes.”

By that time, it may well be that the idea of dealing with embedded carbon will have already advanced significantly. Since ProLogis suspended its U.S. study, retailers like Wal-Mart and utilities like PG&E have undertaken significant efforts to green their own supply chains.

 “Broadly speaking, I think there is an increasing focus on sustainability, and overall the industry is accepting that more,” she continues. “It’s seen as a way for a company to be more closely aligned with their customers’ needs. That is certainly one of the drivers.”

To help foster the proliferation of green, ProLogis has become increasingly involved with organizations like the U.S. Building Council and its UK counterpart, and Green Prints, a global organization focused on reducing carbon in the built environment.

“At the same time, we have a lot of internal programs in place and regular phone calls with our European counterparts to reinforce the sustainable ethic and keep it high on the minds of people at all levels of our organization.” Martinez says.




 

Starting with the low hanging fruit

According to Rob Barron, vice president of NFI Industries and the company’s self-proclaimed “fuel czar,” his company’s wholesale embrace of green came after a discussion of escalating fuel prices in 2008 morphed into a wider conversation about the organization’s core values.

“Basically, as we grappled with rising energy costs and continuing to provide service to our customers, we began to talk more and more about our mission statement and the six core values contained within it,” Barron says.

“One of those is ‘social responsibility,’ and as we began to talk about what that really means, eventually coming around to the fact that in our business, which is transportation, logistics and warehousing, we have a lot of opportunities to reduce our carbon footprint and have a lighter touch on the environment,” he says.

The result was that what started out as a fuel initiative was quickly broadened into a sustainability initiative, and then formally incorporated into NFI Industries’ strategic plan. The company also appointed a senior executive to be responsible for keeping weekly and monthly tabs on the effort.

“Since then, we’ve been really hammering hard on trying to be creative in terms of reducing miles per gallon and eliminating inefficiencies,” Barron says. “Of course, as in any new effort, the first thing we went after was the lowest hanging fruit.”

That included buying and installing APUs (auxiliary power units) on the company’s sleeper trucks, so that rather than having a truck idle overnight to run the air conditioning, it would be run through an independent battery-powered unit, dramatically reducing emissions and fuel consumption.

In addition, NFI Industries began installing tire inflation systems on all its trailers, thereby reducing drag and tire wear on the vehicles.

“Then, as we got more into it, we just sort of continued to move up the tree,” Barron says.

In practice, that meant getting drivers to reduce the speeds they drove on the road, and then having someone actually get under the hoods of the company’s truck fleet and ratchet down both engine rpm and horsepower.

“Our belief was that if you weren’t going as fast, you simply didn’t need the horsepower we relied on in the past,” Barron explains. “At the same time, we did what we could to improve the aerodynamics of our vehicles, purchased lighter weight trucks and just generally went after everything we could creatively come up with to reduce our miles per gallon.”

And, he describes the results as nothing short of “pretty spectacular.”

“Last year, we had a three and a half percent improvement on miles per gallon over 2008, which is a significant improvement in just one year,” he notes. “And this year to date, we’re tracking a further improvement of one percent over last year.

“Of course, that illustrates one of the realities of embracing green-over time it’s going to take a lot more work to achieve relatively smaller additional savings,” he says. “But that’s okay. We are really focused on that.”

But, NFI Industries’ initiatives do lead one to wonder-how do you slow down and conserve fuel in a world that’s historically been defined by fast, often just-in-time delivery?

“That’s a great question, and certainly something we talked about,” Barron acknowledges. “First of all, it requires us to rely even more than we had in the past on our ability to be smart about how we dispatch our equipment and how we lay out routes, and as a result, we’ve gotten better and better at that.

“It also requires us to make sure that we are getting folks out on time,” he says. “It means doing things within a tighter window; but in our experience, it definitely is doable. In fact, what we’ve found is that when you really think about the trucks you see rushing down the road, there’s typically a single reason behind it: They’ve gotten out late and they’re behind schedule.

“We like to think that by doing things efficiently enough to allow for slower speeds, we’re saving fuel, fulfilling a responsibility that we owe the other drivers on the road, and we’re potentially providing our drivers with more time to react to situations they might see in front of them.”

The effort to get its drivers on board is called the Maximize Miles Campaign.

“Essentially, what we said was if we can maximize our miles per gallon, that will allow us to be more cost effective to our customers, and will allow us to retain more of them and successfully gain even more,” Barron says. “So we went to our drivers and said, ‘In addition to being good corporate citizens, this is good for you because the more miles we can get for you, the more opportunities you’ll have to work.”

In implementing the campaign, NFI Industries’ CEO sent a letter out to each and every driver as well as all of the company’s driver managers. The company also put posters up in all of its facilities outlining the importance of maximizing miles and explaining a few simple things that individual drivers could do-like reducing their idling time and keeping track of their tire pressure.

“We also have our managers talk to the drivers on a regular basis, keeping the campaign forefront in their minds,” Barron says. “So there’s a pretty significant and ongoing communication process.”

But its not just drivers who are hearing about “green” on a regular basis-Barron says the company’s sustainability initiatives are part of every senior management meeting.

“Virtually every month someone is asking, ‘How are you doing?’ ‘What’s our progress?’ ‘What are our new initiatives?’ and, if we don’t have any, then ‘What are we doing to find some?’” Barron says.

“Right now, we’re looking at a couple of initiatives to reduce the rolling resistance on our trailers through better alignment, and we’ve actually just purchased 1,000 new tire inflation units to continue to retrofit our trailer fleet,” he says.

The bottom line of all these efforts is to keep everyone’s eye on the ball, and everyone thinking of sustainability and best practices.

“At this point, we could care less what gas prices are,” Barron says. “It’s not something that enters into the discussion of sustainability anymore. Our feeling today is that we want to be driven by benchmarks, the first of which is to have a month where the average fleet mpg comes in at 7.0, something we’re pretty close to achieving.

“Our second benchmark is to do that two months in a row, and after that the benchmark will be to hit 7.0 as our regular average,” he explains. “The feeling is if we continue to strive for those kinds of results, we’ll continue to reduce mpg, reduce emissions and fulfill our corporate obligation to be as green as possible.” wt



Contributing writer Dan McCue lives in Charleston, SC, where he writes on global trade, foreign direct investment, and port-related issues.