Of all the sustainability areas that get the public’s hackles up, personal transportation is one of the biggest (as evidenced by the recent spate of flight-shaming). It’s an area we can make a difference on a day-to-day basis – by choosing public transport or our legs – but it’s also an easy target: we don’t tend to point fingers at that pack of socks at the local supermarket, which might have arrived there via a combination of train, truck and plane – the packaging doesn’t tell us. No, we prefer to direct our blame towards the visible: I leave my house, I get in my car, I hit the gas and there’s my crime.

The ‘hidden’ cost of transporting our socks and other products is one of the areas that is slowly and surely being addressed by large corporations. For example, in numerous European locations as well as California, Shell Global are part of a consortium that are building “three new large-capacity refueling stations for heavy-duty hydrogen fuel-cell trucks being developed by Toyota and Kenworth Truck Company.”

In Switzerland, H2Energy are establishing an association (Agrola AG, AVIA Association, Coop, Coop Mineraloel AG, the fenaco Cooperative, Migrol AG and the Federation of Migros Cooperatives), with the goal to jointly develop a nationwide network of hydrogen refueling stations across the country.

In the electrification landscape, Tesla’s newly planned assembly plant that will be located just outside Berlin, Germany, will likely have a large impact on Germany’s traditional auto manufacturers (such as BMW and Daimler), which currently form the country’s biggest export sector. Ultimately, the move may place pressure on these companies to accelerate the shift to electric.

It’s these types of changes that will affect the overall carbon footprint of that pair of socks in the local supermarket, because every step along the supply chain – from the amount of water used to grow the organic cotton to the fuel amount and type used by the truck that transported the article to the supermarket loading dock – can now be measured.

And every little bit helps us nudge the dial towards net zero emissions.

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If you’re a manufacturer who would like to start tracking your product or materials transportation (and everything else along your value chain!), please do get in touch with us via our contact page.

Image courtesy Tobi via Pexels.