Going green
Filed under: Marketing strategies
Recently, several technology vendors and private fleets have been promoting their environmental strategies. Perhaps the most notable and ambitious of them all is Wal-Mart, which has a goal to improve fuel efficiency by 25 percent in 10 years. Wal-Mart Canada also announced plans to score different parties–suppliers, carriers, etc.–in its logistics network for their efforts in reducing the overall environmental footprint in its supply chain.
Besides the obvious publicity companies generate by being environment friendly, it also helps generate buy-in among employees by repackaging corporate goals to improve efficiency and profitability. Vendors are catching on to this trend as an effective sales tool for technology. GE Fleet Services recently added an interesting feature for tracking CO2 emissions metrics to its Web-based fleet management reporting and analytical tool called my.DashboardSM. Launched as part of its ecomagination platform, GE says this tool can track trends in CO2 emissions against EPA guidelines. The company also offers an annual customer review to make recommendations for ways of reducing fleet emissions of the greenhouse gas CO2.
Companies are also using the environment to save on equipment purchases. I also recently saw that a coalition of shippers and motor carriers, headed by retail giant Target, received public grant towards the purchase of 100 new trucks to move freight at the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Plenty of grants are available from government agencies to reduce emissions. Wal-Mart hasn’t publicly announced it is seeking any grants, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some deals are in the works.
All of this talk about the environment, however, is self serving. Instead of talking about cost cutting and efficiencies, the strategy is to wrap these business objectives into an environmental package for publicity. I’m not convinced that Wal-Mart and other fleets and their technology vendors are truly sincere about reducing their “environmental footprint” as much as they are on improving fuel efficiency for profitability. What is the real benefit to the company? As the largest operating cost, reducing fuel costs is already a major initiative for any private fleet. The truth is, the environment is simply a wrapper for a dollars-and-cents business plan. After all, if you can get good publicity and cut costs, why not?
November 5th, 2007 at 5:09 am
I recently read over at Life on the Road (http://lifeontheroad.com/2007/10/29/aerodynamic-trucks/369.html) about the aerodynamic trucks made by some manufacturers and some of the advances they are making.
I’m eager to see all the advances over time that will be made to equipment to make them more efficient to combat the rising fuel costs.
It is also interesting to see the “green” concept popping up everywhere. it’s all over the technology trade journals as well, not related to trucking, but to server rooms and computer equipment energy consumption and the heat they produce.