Modern business owners should always be looking for ways to make their company more eco-friendly. It’s a big concern for a lot of consumers these days and people are increasingly making their purchasing decisions based on the environmental responsibility of companies. If your business isn’t eco-friendly, you’ll struggle to compete. One of the areas where businesses struggle most is with their shipping operation. Sending products out across the country, or even the world, creates a big carbon footprint and that’s never good for your company image. But if you can find ways to make your shipping eco-friendlier, you’ll attract a lot more customers and it might even save you some money as well. These are some of the best ways to make your shipping process more environmentally friendly.
Use Route Planning Software
You can’t get away from the fact that you’re going to need to use vehicles and they’re producing emissions. But you can do things to limit those emissions and make the process a lot more environmentally friendly. Often, your delivery drivers are putting out more emissions than they need to because they’re not using the most efficient routes and they’re driving more miles than they need to. The best way around this is to use route planning software. It will help you to find the most efficient route so you’re putting out the very minimum amount of emissions possible.
Recycle Materials
Recycling is one of the simplest ways to make your operation eco-friendlier but a lot of businesses aren’t great at it. It’s important that you’re always using recyclable packaging because consumers will take notice of this when they’re choosing products. However, you also need to make sure that you’re recycling any materials that you use in the shipping process itself. For example, if you’re using pallets to deliver products in bulk to your distribution centers, what do you do with them afterward? If they end up being thrown away, that’s not very eco-friendly. But you can easily reuse those pallets or even recycle them (click for more information on this) and that’s a lot more environmentally friendly. What about the plastic wrapping that you’re using to tie products down on your pallets? Is that recyclable or not? If not, it should be. The product packaging is only a small part of it, you need to make sure that all materials at every stage of the shipping process are recyclable.
Go Paperless
Paper is quite easily recycled so people don’t think that it’s really an issue, but using no paper at all is the most eco-friendly to operate. It’s also incredibly easy to manage paper use in your shipping operation and it actually makes it a lot more efficient. If you’re using paper picking lists in warehouses, it’s going to be time-consuming for people to find the products that they need. But if you switch to a barcode scanning system, they can easily find what they need and get it loaded ready for shipping.
If you make your shipping operation eco-friendlier, it improves your company image so much and it also saves you a lot of money.