Exporting could mean your products are travelling vast distances, and of course this transportation, depending on the modality chosen, results in various amounts of fuels expenditure and carbon dioxide emissions. Yet exporting also stimulates economic growth, creates jobs and raises living standards.
There are many different ways you can reduce the environmental impact of exporting, tipping the balance in this play-off between sustainable economic growth and usage of fossil fuels. There are some choices you have to make to be sure that your supply chain is efficient and as sustainable as it can be.
What You Can Do
There are many ways you can make your business more sustainable by designing production processes and products that have less impact on the environment. There are three primary areas that can help make products heading for export markets more sustainable:
• Sustainable packaging design
Designing packaging for your products that ensure they are delivered undamaged means they will only be manufactured and transported once. Undamaged goods will also be used rather than discarded or returned.
Make sure products are not over packaged and use packaging that can be recycled or is made from recycled materials. If the size of product packaging can be minimised, then they’ll take up less space when being transported and more products can be sent with them.
•Sustainable transportation
Consider the modality and speed of transportation for your goods – ocean or air freight? Express or standard? It might be better to consolidate and transport large quantities of goods by ocean freight as ships emit less carbon than aircraft. Also by choosing slower services options your goods will most likely travel by road or rail meaning lower levels of emissions are attributed to your package.
•Optimise shipments
Fit as many products as possible onto a pallet or into a container. Optimising the space used will not only reduce the cost of shipment per product, but will also help us move more products in single shipments, which reduces the impact on the environment.
The sustainability profile of your logistics solution supplier can be a key determinant of the sustainability of your business. UPS’s network serves the global economy the way a public transit system serves a city: it increases energy and carbon efficiency by enabling many individual trips to share the same transport infrastructure. Find out more here.
Read more
How to manage your cashflow if you’re exporting
Content on this page is paid for and provided by UPS, sponsor of the Exporting to New Markets Hub on the Small Business Network.
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