Perform an Environmental Benchmark

 

What is an Environmental Benchmark?

Benchmarking is the process of improving performance by identifying, understanding, analysing and implementing best practice processes discovered through analysis of one’s peers. Benchmarking the environmental performance of your business is very useful in comparing your practises to other organisations and in helping to identify opportunities that can increase the energy efficiency of your business. An environmental benchmark for the transport and logistics industry may catalogue all processes that spend fuel or electricity but may also include other areas of environmental interest such as a company’s waste and water usage, for example.

The amount of energy used in an identified process should be carefully calculated (e.g. the amount of diesel needed to run a heavy vehicle for a year) and compared to an appropriate industry leading organisation where this information is available. 

 

 

What Processes to Benchmark?

The first thing to consider before starting an Environmental Benchmark is deciding on what areas to benchmark. This will be called your Performance Metric. Most benchmarks use an output or activity to analyse. For example in shipping this may be the amount of quantities shipped, or in road transport the amount of kilometres travelled. In the Road Freight industry the more popular used environmental performance metric is Emissions per Tonne Kilometre, and is usually referenced as  grams per tonne kilometre. This is a figure that describes the average emissions your business produces in moving one tonne of freight one kilometre.

In warehousing the most common environmental performance metric is emissions per square metre. Emissions from warehousing would likely be calculated from purchased electricity and applied against your facility size.

While a good environmental benchmark uses data from organisations that have already made significant strides in reducing their emissions, necessary data may not be publicly available to benchmark against. Where this isn’t possible it is still acceptable to utilise the median values collected from either surveying suppliers or national averages.

 

 

 

To see Sustainable Freight's full report on How to Perform an Enviornmental Benchmark with details on the national average and leading competitor metrics click here to access the document.