Director of ESG Jess Bonsall shares how 48forty is expanding our ESG priorities in the year to come.
While the wood pallet as a product is very environmentally friendly, it still has to move from place to place in order to support our customers. When we think about becoming stronger environmental stewards, it’s not only about how we manage that particular pallet, but also how we can extend its life before it has to come out of the supply chain movement.
How many repairs can we integrate into that particular pallet, so that it can continue working and reduce the need for new pallets? Similarly, how can we think about the movement of that pallet from place to place? Can we be more efficient with the way that our trucks are loaded, so that we can carry more pallets and reduce the number of trips we may have to take?
At 48forty, we have a real opportunity to give people the chance to build a career. This is an element of society and the workforce that oftentimes gets overlooked. We have a really fantastic opportunity to start building some new learning and leadership growth elements for our team, so more training opportunities will become available.
We’re also reinvigorating our focus on health and safety, and working to create a positive culture for all of our team members, whether they work on the floor or in our corporate offices. In addition to new initiatives to support this, there will also be new tracking tools to help our teams better understand what it means to work safely.
For everything we undertake, there will be a metric or success criteria that will be defined depending on the specific initiative. We will use these metrics to measure particular success factors over time.
For example, for health and safety initiatives, we will continue to track the number of incidents that we have at our facilities. Are we able to reduce the number of incidents that we’re having year over year? Are we able to reduce the severity of some of those incidents over time? We will use the criteria to gauge our success based on the answers we get.
At 48forty, we are committed to operating sustainably as well as helping our customers lower their carbon footprint, minimize waste, and achieve their sustainability goals in a cost-efficient manner. Learn more about implementing environmentally responsible practices in your supply chain here.