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Is sustainability in logistics coming at the expense of safety?
10th December 2024
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Much like the climate, sustainability in logistics is a hot topic. The need to reach impending climate targets has led to an industry-wide effort to reduce emissions. The fact that the logistics sector contributes around 8% of global emissions provides an opportunity for substantial improvement, but also highlights the scale of the task at hand.
While sustainability is important and necessary, the dominance it has over the narrative around logistics could lead people’s attention – and investment – to drift away from other areas. Safety is one of these, and could have a more immediate and direct impact on the safety of workers throughout the sector.
Sustainability in logistics
Sustainability is a pressing concern for every industry, but it feels particularly relevant to warehousing and logistics. Given the nature of freight and distribution, the sector is one of the most carbon-intensive in the world. What’s more, its footprint only seems to be growing as more and more goods are bought and sold online – making it imperative that changes are made to stem the tide.
What this looks like will vary from business to business. One option is to switch from wooden pallets to plastic pallets, which last longer and would thus reduce the number of trees being felled. Switching to electric vehicles would also help to reduce fossil fuel emissions, while in countries such as the United States, changes could be made to shift freight away from roads and onto railways, which are much more environmentally friendly.
Warehouses also have the capacity to substantially reduce emissions, and often to save money in the process. Fixing leaky loading doors and other points of egress can keep in heat where it’s needed, and out where it isn’t. Eliminating fuel-based forklift trucks can help to reduce emissions and improve air quality around the warehouse. Improving space utilisation through the use of high density pallet racking can also help to make the warehouse more efficient, wasting less energy and requiring less land.
Managing priorities
The (perhaps literally) all-consuming nature of climate change means that this has been the dominant narrative in trade publications, at conferences and at conventions for some time now. It’s the biggest focus for the industry until it isn’t, and that drop-off may come long before the issue is resolved. But the urgency of it – something that’s likely to be accentuated by governments as the deadlines draw nearer – has proved disruptive enough to shift entire supply chains and ways of working.
The danger here is that the focus becomes so relentless that it pushes other priorities down. One of these is safety – an area where there is some overlap. Solving climate change is about safety, in a grand sense. But measures taken to reduce emissions can also have a positive impact on employee health. Reducing particulate emissions from vehicles can make the air cleaner in and around warehouses and distribution centres, while shifting more freight away from trucks and ships and onto railways would be an unequivocal positive.
But what happens when sustainability conflicts with safety? Switching to electric vehicles doesn’t reduce the particulates released by worn tires; the batteries tend to make them heavier than combustion engines, which may wear through tires more quickly. Sealing warehouses to improve insulation may also inhibit indoor airflow and air quality, unless measures are taken to prevent this. More dense warehouse environments pose a greater risk of accidents due to increased traffic. One could come at the expense of another.
A holistic approach
So what can be done to correct this? It’s obvious to say that addressing one issue shouldn’t stop you from addressing another. Making warehousing and logistics more sustainable may be the most important issue to address in the coming years, but it isn’t the only one. Health and safety continues to be extremely important, and far from a solved issue itself. Indeed, massive changes in the form of robotics and automation may introduce new risks.
What’s needed is a realistic and holistic approach to sustainability across the industry. This doesn’t mean shirking responsibility based on what is ‘realistic’ from a cost perspective, but rather weighing up the pros and cons of different sustainability initiatives. For example, the use of warehouse robotics or driverless vehicles may allow you to reduce staff levels as well as reducing emissions – but this shouldn’t be at the cost of a greater workload and mental burden on remaining staff.
Electric vehicles too are not a panacea. The resources required for car batteries are scarce, and mining and refining them causes its own ecological damage. A wired shuttle racking system is a more transparently sustainable upgrade for your warehouse than new electric forklifts. This doesn’t mean that switching to EVs isn’t an improvement in many cases, but it’s important context for your decisions, just as quieter engines on these vehicles should be a safety consideration.
Assessing every risk
History is littered with examples of a well-intentioned decision causing massive, unforeseen consequences down the line. Many ecosystems are near ruin because of invasive species that were introduced decades or centuries ago, from the exotic fish clogging Florida’s waterways, to the infamous cane toads in Australia. We are seeing this play out in real time with the awareness of the damage caused by plastics, and growing research around artificial sweeteners. Every decision we make has ramifications that need to be considered.
In the case of sustainability, this doesn’t mean not taking action for fear of unintended consequences. But it should mean assessing and dealing with the potential risks. If you opt to use modern, quiet electric vehicles, these should be factored into your safety training and facility designs. If you change to more energy efficient lighting systems, these need to illuminate all areas evenly. If you implement or expand warehouse recycling, you also need to consider the impact this could have on traffic flows and pedestrian safety within the warehouse.
So what does all of this mean for businesses? The best way to look at this is by placing any action to improve sustainability within its proper context. If a change is going to be made to the warehouse space, there needs to be a risk assessment, design considerations, and a consultation with employees to determine any potential negative impacts. The same is true of changing vehicles, or implementing new technologies, such as software designed to shorten travel distances.
Any new technology also has to be provable and reliable within the context it will be used in. Upgrading your racking to make a warehouse more space-efficient is generally a safe option, but companies will no doubt advertise sustainability solutions that sound good on paper, but are not sufficiently tailored to the sector. Due diligence will be required to assess the landscape of potential improvements, and not rush headlong into changes due to fear of public perception.
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Sustainability remains the most important focus for warehousing and logistics, and most industries across the board. But particularly when it comes to safety, sustainability improvements shouldn’t be forced through without considering the ripple effects they will have on the rest of the business. As with other aspects of safety, changes are too often made without considering how they might change safety plans and policies.
What this cannot be is an impediment to progress on sustainability. Instead, every decision should be made with the full perspective of how it fits into business, and the impact it will have on the design of the premises, safety and wellbeing of staff, and on existing policies, practices, and methods of work. This level of caution and calculation should protect lives in the short-term, and save them in the long run.
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