Sustainable transportation of goods is now a necessity, guest blog by Callum Bastock, CEO and Founder of CCL Logistics & Technology

Historically, it has been extremely difficult to calculate emissions data associated with the logistics and transportation of goods, essentially due to the variety of modes of transport, distance travelled, and consignment weights involved. 

The sheer amount of data, and its convoluted nature, is something our team spent the last few years trying to tackle, investing heavily in our transport management system where our customers’ logistics data is held centrally.  In turn, this has enabled us to run complex calculations in the background to work out transportation and distribution emissions across the supply chain.  

Scope 3 emissions are defined as all indirect emissions that occur in the value chain of the reporting company, including both upstream and downstream emissions.  To put things in context, Scope 3 emissions usually account for more than 70 per cent of a business’s carbon footprint, far greater than direct emissions from burning fuel and consuming electricity (Scope 1 and 2). 

Today, when no corporation can put its head in the sand when everyone knows the importance of sustainability in tackling climate change, we operate in an environment of heightened compliance pressure and increasingly stringent reporting requirements.  

Research last year revealed that 90 per cent of the FTSE 100 will only work with suppliers that share their environmental, social & governance (ESG) credentials, another indication of the writing on the wall.  There is now an absolute expectation from public companies that vendors and suppliers can provide their emissions record. 

While our business model has always been about supporting customers to reduce costs and grow, in recent times sustainability has moved very much to the front and centre as organisations realise how crucial it is to tackle Scope 3 emissions in order to meet climate change targets. 

Last year, we achieved a milestone for our collective efforts when we became the first UK logistics services group to be accredited by the Smart Freight Centre, the international non-profit focused on reducing the emissions impact of global freight transportation.  

Branded ‘Greener Routes’, our innovative sustainability feature means customers can now measure, manage, and minimise their CO2 emissions.  Sustainability is paramount for our larger UK and European customers, and the CO2 emissions calculator embedded in our system provides customers with a CO2 statement at the click of a button. 

Overall, we are helping to facilitate Scottish and UK export trade in a much more sustainable fashion, so we’re pleased to be playing a supporting role in terms of being a driver of economic impact.  Exporting and importing is complex, and we simply the whole process for our customer base. 

In terms of our own scorecard, we want to measure ourselves against the best in the industry, including against those on the international scene, while, closer to home, being one the most innovative technology companies to come out of Scotland.  

In 2023, CCL was one of the first cohort of companies invited onto Sir Tom Hunter’s Scale Up Scotland 2.0 programme, which in itself was an amazing experience.  The year finished on another high when The Hunter Foundation hosted a Founders Conference at Gleneagles where it was great to meet up and hear from a fantastic line-up of corporate luminaries, sharing stories and intel from out on the coalface. 

As 2024 gets underway, we wish all our peers on the business scene a successful year ahead. S