Sustainability: It’s just smart business

Sustainability is one of the most pressing topics of our day. More consumers than ever are voting with their wallets for brands whose principles align with theirs. This has led to businesses from all sectors rethinking the way they produce, exchange, and how and what they sell to consumers.

Products, packaging materials and shipping practices now play an overarching and facilitating role in contributing to the sustainable improvement of supply chains. Apart from being a buzzword you can splash across your website, sustainability in practice is smart business, as by harnessing optimisation you can not only reduce emissions, but also crucially, costs.

How can optimization help me?

Anyone that has purchased products from Amazon is familiar with receiving a bicycle-sized box for your phone case. Items are often packaged individually in small plastic bags, small products are delivered in huge packages, the same order is delivered in multiple packages. Online retailers often use standard box sizes to ship all goods, filling the free space with packing materials. This not only means that additional, unnecessary packaging is included, but also the package itself takes up more room in the van, meaning less parcels can be delivered in one go. Making concerted efforts to reduce packaging waste can have a significant impact on your business’s footprint, and bottom line.

A domino effect of lowered costs

It is important to consider how changes in packaging could impact your total packaging system cost and the domino effect that can have on lowering other costs. Once you’ve ensured the protection of your product, can you fit it into smaller, reusable packaging, and in so doing, optimize transportation and storage? By making a packaging change, you then in turn can fit more on a pallet and improve your overall shipping density. You’ll be able to fit more products in storage or on a retail shelf, and help reduce inventory and storage requirements.

Even a small reduction in packaging can have dramatic implications on a company’s environmental footprint. Consider, producing 1 tonne of corrugated cardboard uses approximately 4 tonnes of wood, 66,000 liters of water and produces approximately 7.7 tonnes of CO2. This is the equivalent of sending a 3 kilogram package by plane from Sydney to Melbourne 7,700 times. If you can shave off your material use you are reducing your environmental footprint.

Once you’ve considered the packaging, it’s important to next think about how it stacks in a pallet. Pallets are very efficient when it comes to transporting multiple items of small dimensions from one point to another. Think of your pallet as a block. It needs to be compact, solid and perfectly square to reach its optimum strength. There are a multitude of pallet calculators at your disposal to quickly compute optimized pallet loads depending on the type of pallet you need to use. Websites include Packair, Onpallet and iCalculator.

Optimizing all the way to your customer’s doorstep

You can reduce your footprint by storing your products closer to your customer, using practices such as direct injection, order orchestration and in-country fulfillment options.

Direct Injection

Direct-injection is the process of consolidating multiple orders for the first leg of their journey overseas, after which they’re ‘injected’ into the destination country’s courier network for final delivery.

Benefits of Direct-injection over postal include:

• Cheaper shipping costs
• Cleaner shipping methods
• Faster delivery times
• More reliability and predictability
• Signature on delivery
• Goods can be customs cleared in transit
• Scaling opportunities for smaller retailers

Order Orchestration

Order Orchestration activates a dynamic selection of a warehouse from which to fulfill an order based on proximity to your customer. With Order Orchestration you can fulfill an order from the most optimal location and eliminate unnecessary journeys. An Order Orchestration approach saves on shipping costs and speeds up delivery. It also opens up choice for more sustainable last mile shipping options.

In-country fulfillment

By harnessing local fulfillment, you are able to use less emissions- intensive transport closer to where your customers are located. This in turn helps reduce emissions, speed up delivery times and drive down costs, which become savings that can be passed on to your customers. The last-mile supply chain made possible by local fulfillment centers could lower last-mile emissions between 17 and 26% by 2025.

Measuring impact

By implementing sustainable strategies such as order orchestration, streamlined packaging, pallet optimization, local fulfillment and direct injection shipping, you can lower costs whilst reducing your carbon footprint. By taking stock of your current costs to act as a baseline, why not try optimizing some of the components we’ve outlined in this article and see how it affects your bottom line? We’re confident that you’ll see that by acting sustainably, you’ll see you’re not just saving the planet, you’re also saving your business.

Want to chat to a logistics partner who can help optimize your supply chain and costs, why not get in touch with Borderless360 today? Contact us.