How Logistics Companies Can Ensure Their Activities Align With Sustainability

Julie Starr • February 15, 2022



Logistics companies have a huge responsibility to ensure their activities align with sustainability. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it’s also becoming more and more important as consumers become more environmentally conscious. This blog post will discuss the different ways logistics companies can make sure they’re operating sustainably. We’ll cover topics such as reducing energy consumption, choosing environmentally friendly transportation options, and recycling and composting. By following these guidelines, logistics companies can help reduce their environmental impact while still providing high-quality services to their customers!

1. A Sustainable Vision

The first step in ensuring your logistics company operates sustainably is to create a vision for sustainability . This means setting goals and targets that you want to achieve and creating a plan on how to reach them. It’s important to make sure all team members are on board with the vision, as everyone will need to work together to make it a reality.

To ensure buy-in from your team, make sure they’re involved in creating the sustainability vision. This way, they’ll feel like it’s their idea and not just something imposed on them by management!

Once you’ve created your vision statement for sustainability, it’s important to present it to the rest of your team, so they understand what you want them all working towards together. Presenting this information upfront will also help motivate employees who might be skeptical about how much impact their individual actions can have on such a large problem as climate change or pollution levels worldwide.

2. Sustainability Leadership Throughout The Company

Once your team is on board with the vision for sustainability, it’s important to ensure that leadership supports and promotes sustainable practices throughout the company. This means setting an example for employees by implementing sustainable policies and initiatives in your own office and working with suppliers and other companies to promote similar practices.

Having key team members walk the talk and set an example for others to follow is one of the most important ways to ensure a sustainable vision becomes a reality. When people see that management is serious about making changes, they’re more likely to get on board and work towards common goals.

3. Create Awareness On How To Achieve Sustainability

For logistics companies to make changes that will positively impact the environment, everyone involved needs to know what’s going on. This means creating awareness campaigns on everything from reducing energy consumption to choosing environmentally friendly transportation options.

These campaigns must be interactive and engaging, so employees feel like they’re part of the process rather than just being told what to do. Providing information in an easy-to-read format is also helpful, as not everyone has time to attend long meetings or read through lengthy reports.

By providing regular updates and making sure employees are aware of your progress towards sustainability goals, you’ll create a sense of ownership and responsibility within your team. This will help ensure that everyone is working together to make your logistics company more environmentally friendly!

4. Conduct Environmental Impact Assessments

It’s important for businesses to understand their environmental impact to make changes where necessary. Conducting an assessment can help logistics companies identify areas of concern and develop targeted strategies for addressing them.

You should consider conducting assessments on all aspects of your business : from how you manage waste disposal at the office through to what type of fuel is used in delivery vehicles (and whether it could be replaced with a greener alternative). It may also include an evaluation process that looks at topics such as energy use or water efficiency within buildings owned by the company.

By assessing these areas regularly and adjusting accordingly, you’ll ensure that every part of your organization has been reviewed – including any suppliers who might contribute towards emissions or pollution levels worldwide. This way, there is a collaborative effort to reduce environmental impact and promote sustainability.

5. Set KPIs And Targets

In order to track your progress towards sustainability goals, it’s important to set key performance indicators (KPIs) and targets. This will help you measure how well your company is doing in terms of reducing its environmental impact and becoming more sustainable overall.

A variety of KPIs could be used when measuring sustainability , depending on the specific goals of your organization. However, some common examples include carbon emissions levels, energy consumption, water usage, and waste generated.

By setting targets for each KPI and then tracking your progress over time, you’ll have a concrete way of knowing whether you’re making headway or not. This information can also be shared with employees, so they know exactly what’s being done to make the business more environmentally friendly.

6. Source From Sustainability Minded Suppliers

As you’re probably aware, not all suppliers are created equally. Some may have better eco-friendly practices than others, which could make them a more sustainable choice for your logistics company. It’s important to consider this when sourcing materials or equipment from different providers.

By choosing sustainability-minded partners that share the same vision as you do, it will be easier to implement new strategies within your business and ensure everyone is working together towards common goals. This also means there’ll be less resistance along the way when changes need to happen quickly in response to new developments outside of their control.

For example, choosing a contractor that conducts HSE risk assessments before working on heavy equipment has a lower risk of an incident or an impact arising from their activities. Logistics companies have the serious mechanical infrastructure to service. Oil spills and other environmental impacts can severely expose the company to risks. Click here to check out M&L Truck Service to get an idea of the type of work logistics companies can be expected to carry out.

7. Learn From Environmental Impacts

If an environmental issue has impacted your business, it’s important that you take time to understand what went wrong and how this could be avoided in the future. This will help ensure similar mistakes aren’t made again – which means there’ll be less chance of another incident occurring as well!

Environmental impacts can come from many different sources: natural disasters like wildfires or floods; human error such as spills during transport operations (e.g., oil tanker accidents). It may also result from poor management decisions at higher levels within logistics companies who don’t consider their actions when planning out projects such as deforestation for road construction etc. Learning lessons should involve taking responsibility on all fronts too so everyone understands where their role fits into preventing these types of things happening again.

Making small changes to how your logistics company operates can have a big impact on the environment – and it’s something that we should all be striving for. By following these five tips, you’ll be well on your way to creating a sustainable vision for your business!

How Student-Led ‘Energy Audits’ Are Cutting School Costs (and Lighting the Way Forward)

By Julie Starr • July 14, 2025
What happens when students stop waiting for adults to fix things and start conducting their own energy audits? Money gets saved. The lights get switched off. Data gets analyzed. And a quiet revolution in sustainability begins—inside schools that once overlooked their own inefficiencies. Across the globe, student-led energy audits are proving that change doesn't always need to come from a policy shift or a major capital budget. Sometimes, it begins with a clipboard, a spreadsheet, and a group of curious minds asking: Why are the hallway lights on at noon when sunlight floods the building? The Energy Detectives These audits aren’t science fair projects. They’re rigorous investigations, often done in collaboration with facilities staff, local environmental nonprofits, or even engineering mentors. Students go from classroom to classroom measuring electricity usage, checking for phantom loads , and identifying where heat is escaping in winter or air conditioning is leaking in summer. One high school in Ontario saved over $12,000 a year after its Grade 11 physics students ran an energy audit and suggested simple changes—LED upgrades, motion sensors in bathrooms, and smarter heating schedules. They didn’t just propose ideas. They pitched them with spreadsheets, thermal images, and payback timelines. It worked. Learning That Pays Off—Literally Unlike textbook learning, these audits blend real-world math, environmental science, economics, and persuasive communication. Students aren’t just learning about sustainability. They’re doing it. And the savings add up. From dimming overlit hallways to reprogramming HVAC systems that run all weekend for empty buildings, students are surfacing blind spots that administrators often overlook. In some districts, their findings are influencing energy policy. Elsewhere, the audits have inspired school boards to hire sustainability coordinators—often alumni of the student programs themselves. There’s something poetic about a school funding new books or laptops from money saved by students who found out the vending machines didn’t need to be plugged in 24/7. Why This Matters More Than Ever With education budgets tightening and utility costs rising, every dollar saved is a dollar that can go back into classrooms. And here’s where it gets interesting from a family finance perspective, too. If you’re a parent setting aside money for post-secondary savings, every bit of school efficiency helps. Fewer energy costs might mean more programming, better STEM facilities, or even bursaries. That raises a broader point: when families save for their children’s future, they often look into RESPs (Registered Education Savings Plans). And many wonder—is a RESP deduction available on my taxes? While contributions themselves aren’t deductible, the gains grow tax-free, and students often pay little to no tax when they withdraw the funds during school. A Movement Worth Replicating These audits aren’t just an exercise in environmentalism. They’re leadership labs. Students learn how to spot inefficiencies, speak up in board meetings, and make a business case for change. They don’t just flip switches—they shift mindsets. And they carry these habits into adulthood. The result? A generation growing up not only with climate anxiety, but also with tools to tackle it.

Smart Sensors, Smarter Supply Chains: Enhancing Traceability in Food & Beverage

By Julie Starr • June 20, 2025
In today’s competitive food and beverage (F&B) landscape, traceability is no longer a compliance checkbox—it’s a differentiator. The ability to track every step of a product’s journey, from origin to shelf, is vital for regulatory accuracy and to ensure brand integrity, supply chain agility, and consumer trust. Add smart sensors to the mix: the quiet, tireless observers revolutionizing supply chain intelligence. Traceability Has a Data Problem Despite digitization across many F&B operations, most traceability systems still rely on fragmented or manual data inputs. Batch numbers, barcodes, and handwritten logs often stand between a supplier and clarity when things go wrong. This approach struggles with latency and scale. When contamination or delays occur, root cause analysis is slow, costly, and damaging. Smart sensors shift this paradigm by embedding real-time, contextual intelligence into every stage of the supply chain . Whether monitoring humidity in transit or recording fill-level precision in bottling plants, they remove the guesswork by turning physical conditions into structured, time-stamped data. From Passive Monitoring to Active Optimization Sensors used to be reactive tools, alerting operators to anomalies. But smart sensors now play a proactive role in process control. They measure, and they interpret. For example, temperature sensors embedded in cold chain logistics can dynamically adjust cooling systems or flag threshold breaches before spoilage occurs. These advancements reduce waste and loss at a systemic level. In a production facility, smart sensors integrated with PLCs can enforce recipe compliance, verify clean-in-place processes, and detect micro-stoppages in real-time. This enables operations to pivot faster and isolate inefficiencies before they cascade downstream. Trust is Built on Transparency Consumers are paying more attention to what they eat and drink. They’re looking beyond labels, expecting visibility into how ingredients are sourced, processed, and handled. Smart sensors make this level of transparency achievable —without burdening manufacturers with excessive manual oversight. By capturing metadata throughout production and distribution, these sensors create a digital footprint that’s tamper-resistant and instantly accessible. When this data is integrated with a central platform, brands can respond confidently to audits, recalls, and quality assurance challenges with a level of precision that would be impossible through legacy systems. Intelligence Without Infrastructure Overhaul One common misconception is that adding smart sensors requires a top-down reinvention of supply chain infrastructure. In reality, companies can deploy edge sensors in a modular, scalable way. Many modern solutions offer plug-and-play functionality, allowing for fast integration with existing machinery and MES systems. This is where suppliers like alps-machine.com are reshaping expectations. Rather than pushing proprietary ecosystems, they design sensor-ready equipment with interoperability in mind. This future-proofs investment and keeps businesses nimble in the face of regulatory or market shifts. Designing for Data Longevity Sensors are only as powerful as the context they capture. A smart implementation ensures the data collected can be standardized, stored securely, and accessed meaningfully across departments. This means moving beyond local dashboards toward centralized, queryable datasets that inform everything from supplier contracts to marketing claims. As AI and predictive analytics become more accessible, these data-rich environments will unlock new capabilities—such as predicting demand spikes based on real-time freshness indicators or adjusting production schedules dynamically based on in-transit sensor feedback. Final Thoughts: Smarter Isn’t Optional Traceability isn’t solved by more paperwork—it’s solved by embedded intelligence. Smart sensors don’t just help businesses know what happened; they help prevent the wrong things from happening at all. For companies in the food and beverage sector, adopting smart sensors is less about chasing innovation and more about enabling resilience, speed, and confidence in every decision.