Fleet Transport June 2020

COMMENT | 25
The Race towards being
Green in the Supply Chain
From where I'm sitting
- Howard Knott - howard@fleet.ie
In early January, I put together a
power-point under the above title
that was intended for the National
Manufacturing Conference taking
place at Citywest later that month. I
reckoned that the audience would be drawn
from a range of industries and disciplines
and would not have many Supply Chain
specialists. So, what I set out to do was
to make them aware of just how diverse
the Supply Chain options were for any
export or import shipment point of view,
and to indicate how “good” or “bad” each
mode was in terms of its carbon and other
noxious gas footprint.
Even before the intended launch of the talk
I was given the opportunity to take it to a
high level group meeting of exporters. Out of
that meeting came a fresh focus on the superopenness
of the Irish manufacturing export
economy, in which many of the companies
involved had their headquarters outside of
Ireland and where much of the production
from locally based companies was in the food
and drink sectors. Each of these categories
have been becoming increasingly sensitive
to just how “green” their supply chains are.
Both groups of shippers now find themselves
under pressure from both “ethical” investors
and from consumers who are demanding to
know the carbon footprint of their products
and seeking to purchase those products with
the lowest score.
At that exporters meeting some were anxious
that Ireland’s very obvious location on
the map, as an offshore island off another
offshore island, might turn investors to relocate
to places closer to their home market.
This puts significant pressure on everybody
with an interest in Irish export development
to be able to demonstrate that production
here is low on the emissions scale.
Over the intervening months I have had the
opportunity to make a similar presentation
mainly through webinars. February’s General
Election results validated the thesis that the
general public is indeed becoming “green”
aware, while the new European Commission
has also come out with its European Green
Deal programme outline for the next seven
years.
In conversations surrounding these
presentations I was told of a very significant
number of real developments involving each
of the modes of freight transport, with each
of them seeking to make that mode the least
polluting mode - or at least a great deal better
than hitherto. From the road haulage side,
Stage D Euro 6 diesels and Electric LGV’s
are already delivering, while fuel cell and
hydrogen technology is being developed
by Nikola and others.
For rail, the designation by the EU
Commission that 2021 is to be the “European
Year of Rail” is expected to push substantial
investment into development of that mode,
both in terms of services being offered and
technology being developed. This is bound to
help enable Irish Rail to make the long hoped
for development of its liner freight services
linking Irish ports with manufacturers
and consumers with longer, faster and
ever more environmentally friendly trains.
Meanwhile, full implementation of the
global low-sulphur emissions regulations
by the maritime industry is now a fact and
is already showing dramatic improvement
of air quality in coastal areas of the English
Channel and elsewhere.
The airfreight business is the mode that
could face very significant changes with
the arrival on the scene of the cargo drone.
The most dramatic of these may be the US
Air Force developed Sabrewing unmanned
cargo aircraft launched on 1 May, with a
cargo carrying capacity of 2,450 kg.
Pulling together the learnings from this
series of talks, two things jump out for me.
First is that the key enabler of low-emission
transport is renewable electric energy. In an
Irish context the big push must be on the
development of offshore wind technology.
Second is the development of freight route
planners that enable the shipper to choose
not only the quickest or cheapest route to
market, but also to know exactly how “green”
that chosen route is.
It will be fascinating to see, but maybe
Ireland’s geography is not too bad as a global
manufacturing location after all.
www.fleet.ie