CorpComms Magazine

Beth Burgess was not amused. A television advert for fabric conditioner Lenor claimed 14,000 truck movements a year would be saved if people switched to using its smaller concentrated fabric conditioner. Also, packaging would be cut by 70 percent and there would be more shelf space in supermarkets.

Burgess, the wife of a Derbyshire haulage company manager, was so unimpressed she was moved to protest to the Advertising Standards Agency. She told RoadTransport.com: 'I think it is detrimental to the haulage industry. I think wagon drivers are vilified these days, very much so. Why should they be penalised?'

Burgess is very much in the minority, however. The advertisement, which first aired last summer, was roundly supported by the Energy Saving Trust, and Rebecca Snell, the brand manager at Procter & Gamble - Lenor's parent company - who devised the campaign, was named as one of the 10 faces of the future by Marketing.

Moreover, the advertisement is an acknowledgement of the importance now attached to environmental issues. The UK has grown so infatuated with the notion of sustainability that former chancellor Nigel Lawson seethingly referred to it as 'the new religion of eco-fundamentalism' in 2006.

In the corporate world, environmental issues are being most fiercely tackled in the fields of transportation and logistics, as they account for 75 percent of a firm's carbon footprint. According to a 2007 report by eyefortransport, the online consultant, 77 percent of European companies rate green issues as 'important' or 'very important' to their business strategies, and 81 percent believe environmentalism will become more integral to their logistics over the next three years (see Environmentally strategic, right).

Strategic moves

Katharine O'Reilly, director of environmental research at eyefortransport, says businesses have realised that potential recruits want to work for companies with a strong commitment to helping the environment. To ignore their concerns has the potential to alienate a pool of workers. 'More and more businesses are seeing this as a business decision as well as a CSR and environmental debate,' O'Reilly says.

She points to the increasing number of companies participating in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), which assesses greenhouse gas emissions data from the world's biggest companies. Last year, 2,400 companies participated; this year the number is expected to be 3,000, and will for the first time include companies from China, arguably the world's biggest gas guzzler.

FTSE 100 firms participating in the CDP include AstraZeneca, the pharmaceuticals giant, and Xstrata, the mining major. There also 385 corporate investors funding the project, including Merrill Lynch and HSBC. Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and former US president Bill Clinton are among the CDP's more high-profile backers.

Fewer footprints

O'Reilly points out that green thinking in logistics is very much the norm in the UK now. She is also the director of the Green Logistics Forum, and says that while there was a 'good response' for attendance at the organisation's Green Transportation & Logistics World Summit in Zurich last month, a similar conference in San Francisco in 2007 generated much greater excitement.

'The issue isn't as in vogue here as it is now in the US. In Europe, we've been hearing about it for some time,' she explains, suggesting that this illustrates how environmentalism is now embedded in mainstream UK business thinking.

One of the speakers at the world summit was Ian Barnes, sustainable development manager at Alliance Boots, the high street chemist. He argues that there are real financial savings to be made from reducing the company's carbon footprint. For example, Alliance Boots used to deliver stock to Inverness from Glasgow and the vehicles would return empty. It now employs JBT, the road haulage firm, which brings back stock from Inverness as well as delivering it there. This saves an estimated 6,000 miles a week. 'Look at the number of litres of petrol saved - 150,000 in just one initiative,' says Barnes. 'That's quite a saving.'

Indeed it is, at about £135,000. Less easy to put a figure on is expectation because, as Barnes argues, shareholders expect companies to reduce their carbon footprint. It could be argued that the shareholders would invest elsewhere if they believed Boots did not share their concerns.

Boots is demonstrating its commitment, therefore, by moving from single to double-decker haulage vehicles by 2009, which should reduce its carbon emissions in the UK by 25 percent. Already the company's carbon footprint is 10 percent lower than in the 2003/04 financial year.

Some major brand names have even made a new industry out of providing environmental logistics advice. Motorola, for example, is best known for its mobile phone technology, but has released a series of products to help other companies manage their logistics requirements.

David Picton, head of the industry solutions group for transport and logistics at Motorola's enterprise mobility business, admits the products are 'tied to the business case' - that is, they need to make money - but is obviously proud of their environmental benefits.

One of Motorola's products is a handheld computer for drivers when they deliver stock. Rather than recording details such as the number of units it has transported on paper, which would cost 10p-15p per sheet, it can mark the data on the computer. It can also read barcodes.

'We are looking to drive paper out of businesses,' explains Picton. Another product is a computer navigation device - 'a bit like a Sat Nav,' says Picton - which helps to cut down on fuel emissions, preventing lorry drivers from getting lost.

New business

Indeed, so successful has Motorola's enterprise mobility business been that the brand name might become more closely associated with this division's products. Motorola is currently considering a split, with its phone handset business likely to be spun off; this core business lost $388 mn (£19.7 mn) in the final quarter last year, while revenue at enterprise mobility increased 35 percent to $2.1 bn.

Some industries, though, simply will not see their carbon usage eliminated by modern technology. 'We've still got to have these big juggernauts coming on to site,' admits Tony Pidgley, managing director of Berkeley Group, the FTSE 250 housebuilder. 'You're never going to solve that with a bit of logistics. We've cut down dramatically on the number of lorries, but I can't tell you we've cracked it.'

Berkeley is, however, moving toward a zero-waste policy on site, such as cutting plasterboard to the size of the property before delivery. In the past, plasterboard would not have been prefabricated but tailored on-site. 'Where we were to where we've got to has been tremendous,' says Pidgley. 'We use more and more green materials as the whole world is looking to be more eco-friendly.'

Pidgley did not amass an estimated £123 mn fortune from nothing - famously, he was a Barnardo's boy raised in a caravan - by embracing ideas like environmentalism without one eye on the potential commercial upside. Berkeley's very public commitment to green issues, which includes a yearly sustainability report that is displayed prominently on the company's website, is made with a view to the future.

'Although I don't believe housebuying customers yet think about the environmental impact of construction site logistics, in the next five to 10 years, housebuilders that don't do this kind of thing may well suffer financially,' Pidgley says.

And there's bad news for Burgess: Procter & Gamble has no intention of letting up on its own sustainability campaign. Dr John Bailey, Procter & Gamble's fabric and homecare external relations manager, says the advertisement was just the latest step in a sustainability campaign that started back in 1989, when the company launched Ariel Ultra. That concentrated product recommended using a dose of just 85g, about half that of other powders.

'You've got to take the consumer with you. We spent a lot of money on marketing to convince the public about the product, but we failed,' says Bailey.

The problem was that, standing side by side with other Procter & Gamble products in their large boxes at similar prices, people doubted they were getting value for money from Ariel Ultra.

There was also evidence people were using too much of the new powder in their doses. It was not until about 1995 that consumers started to understand that these stronger products were more efficient than their big-box predecessors.

Less is more

The powder started to be sold as a tablet, preventing consumers from using too much of the product. Since then, people have become more environmentally aware - hence the focus on how the concentrated product means there are fewer lorry movements needed for distribution.

'We're not in the business of making lorry drivers redundant,' sighs Bailey. 'But we are making logistics more efficient. Remember, there has been a lot of progress in the lorry industry as well - the roads are bigger and the lorries are longer.'

Unfortunately for Burgess, the very people she looked to defend seem to agree with Bailey. On the website www.haulageexchange.com there were three comments from drivers, all criticising her opinion. The most damning, posted by 'Colin', said: 'It's an advert. If the figures are correct, it can only be good for the environment. Truck drivers are vilified and always have been; we learn to live with it. The way I see it truck drivers will always be needed - everything we use is delivered on a truck, from a packet of sugar in the supermarket to the bricks holding our houses up. Personally I think Beth Burgess' complaint is pathetic.'

And that gets to the heart of the matter: transportation and logistics will always be key to almost every company and industry. Making them more efficient and less harmful to the environment means they can now also become a key part of a company's marketing strategy.

Mail manoeuvres

Royal Mail has introduced double-decker trailers into its vehicle pool in an effort to cut down the environmental impact of its distribution network.

The UK's leading postal service has acquired 140 double-decker trailers, which have the capacity to hold 50 percent more mail than conventional trailers, to reduce road miles and carbon emissions by around 20 percent.

Every day the new trailers will cut out the equivalent of two journeys around the circumference of the world or, to put it another way, 56 trips from Land's End to John O'Groats.

The specially designed trailers, which have a moving floor that can be loaded and raised to the roof to create additional space below, hold around 100,000 items of mail.

In more comprehensible terms, their capacity is equivalent to that of the daily mailbags sent to the London Borough of Islington or the city of Carlisle in Cumbria.

'We are motoring toward our goal of creating a greener transport fleet,' explains Paul Tolhurst, Royal Mail's network director. 'Measures such as the double-decker trailers help improve our efficiency - and we are already aware that improved business performance goes hand in hand with improved environmental performance.'

Royal Mail, under its integrated carbon management programme, has already cut emissions from its transport fleet by 28 percent between 2003 and 2006.

Environmentally strategic

Concern over environmental issues has a far greater influence on strategic decisions in Europe than in America, the Middle East or Asia, according to eyefortransport's green logistics survey, conducted last year between June and October.

Whereas 67 percent of European companies view green issues as 'important' or 'very important', only 59 percent of their US counterparts and 57 percent of companies in the Middle East and Asia feel the same.

Just 3 percent of European companies say environmental issues are 'not important' at all, compared with 6 percent of American companies and 9 percent of companies in the Middle East and Asia.

The results, which are based on a survey of 536 companies, half of which are in the transportation and logistics industries, reveal the maturity of the green debate in Europe. But 22 percent of companies in the Middle East and Asia and 9 percent of US companies claim they will treat it as 'their number one priority' over the next three years. The most common prevailing - and, indeed, planned - green initiative in logistics is to improve energy efficiency.

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