Bromma’s footprint

22 Feb 2012 - By Gavin van Marle - Editor's Blog

A few years ago I was editor of the UK-based logistics newspaper International Freighting Weekly during a period – since forgotten during the financial crisis and the ensuing paradigm of cost-consciousness – when carbon footprint reporting became something of a craze.

Stories were all over the mainstream press of retailers – particularly supermarkets such as Tesco and Marks & Spencer – printing the detailed carbon emissions that went into the supply chain of the individual products found on their shelves.

Ignorant of the complexities of global, twenty-first century supply chains, most mainstream journalists had no idea of what a Herculean task this constituted – as if carbon footprints could somehow be Googled on an iPhone (actually, there was no such thing as an iPhone at that time, but you get the drift).

But me and my reporters spent months investigating the various claims of these retailers, because we believed them to be highly suspect. At one point I sat down and wrote the following: “It is inconceivable to us that a joint of roast lamb presented on a London Sunday lunch table can have a lower carbon footprint if it has been sourced from New Zealand rather than in Wales…”

I simply couldn’t see how something transported from the other side of the world – whatever the favourable emissions per teu of container shipping – was greener than something trucked a couple of hundred miles, because the imported New Zealand lamb still had to be trucked from the port entry, right?

I invited readers to disabuse me of my preconceptions, and they weren’t slow to do so. The reason, I was told and which I subsequently verified, had nothing to do with transport but the emissions generated in the production of the animal feed Welsh lambs are fed, rather than the succulent pastures on which Kiwi lambs graze.

The ports connection? I was reminded of this last week when talking to Bromma’s VP of product business development, Lars Meurling, about the Swedish company’s decision to locate all its spreader manufacturing in Malaysia and yet continue to fabricate its products using Swedish steel.

Mr Meurling said that the company had conducted an environmental audit that had revealed some surprising results: that its current supply chain was almost 10 times greener than the obvious alternative – Chinese steel fabricated from Brazilian or Australian iron ore – because of the emissions generated through the ore transport. Swedish steel is fabricated from domestic ore, despite the fact it then has to be shipped to Malaysia.

In an interesting parallel between the high street and the port industry, Mr Meurling added that so far port operators had shown little interest in the carbon footprint of the spreaders they acquired; which is much the same conclusion that Tesco recently came to. Tesco announced last month that it was dispensing with carbon labelling because firstly, consumers seemed uninterested, and secondly, because there had not been the industry-wide take-up it had expected.

Which is a shame, because whatever the imperfections of carbon footprint reporting, it seems to me to be simply a case of best practice to have an understanding of the impact of one’s procurement strategies – be they food or capital equipment – whatever the economic environment may be, because the threats to the real environment are not going away and every aspect of society will be affected by them. Audits such as that undertaken by Bromma ought to be applauded, and supported.

Image: Coffee Hero | Flickr