Sustainability
Our vision for a 100 year company is not about reaching an end-point. It’s a mindset that every day and every deed is about growing a strong, iconic, enduring business.
Sustainability and Environmental Management
Our vision for a 100 year company is not about reaching an end-point. It’s a mindset that every day and every deed is about growing a strong, iconic, enduring business. This means leaving the place better than we found it. Do all we can to safeguard the future of our people, our communities and our planet.
Mainfreight promotes a clean, safe and healthy environment for all our team. We are committed to exceeding minimum environmental standards where practicable. Climate change remains an issue for businesses and governments everywhere. For Mainfreight it begins with accepting that our business is based on an activity that generates carbon emissions and therefore taking responsibility to reduce those emissions over time while maintaining our competitiveness and ability to deliver quality services as our customers expect.
Mainfreight’s commitment to sustainability, safety, health and the environment has been, and continues to be, a fundamental element of our operating practices and success to date. While our initiatives vary from country to country to achieve greatest impact, we remain committed to these and to expanding them were practicable:
- Recycling
- Reducing emissions
- Promoting energy-efficiencies
- Route planning – using GPS in congested international cities
- We continue to lobby for the ability to move more domestic freight by rail, because the simple fact is trucks emit 4.6 times more CO2 per tonne km carried than trains. It is critical for the wealth and productivity of all countries that rail services improve not only to reduce carbon emissions but also to improve the efficiency of their domestic transport infrastructures.
- We take the opportunity to build more freight facilities on rail-served land
- Moving capacity from road to rail and coastal shipping
- Truck size management – using smaller trucks for distribution within cities and larger trucks between cities
- Promoting off-peak distribution, particularly between cities and from ports
- Efficient driving techniques promulgated through our driver training programs
- Vehicle maintenance guidelines for owner-drivers to promote efficient running of their trucks
- The conversion of gas and diesel powered forklifts operating on our docks to electric, and the use of manual pallet trucks to replace forklifts where practicable
- Adding hybrid and electric cars to our fleet of business cars
- Fleet renewal program - to ensure that latest driving technology is on the road replacing older and inefficient models
- Owner driver model encourages efficiencies because it is in the drivers best interest to drive an efficient vehicle
Our Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Sustainability and Information Technology
Reducing the environmental impact of IT infrastructure is important. Our data centres in New Zealand, Australia and the United States of America are as energy efficient as possible through initiatives including:- Minimising computer room space to minimise cooling requirements
- Installing efficient cooling systems
- Using virtualisation to reduce hardware required, - and heat generated – Mainfreight currently runs 48 major applications across only 12 physical servers
- Using hardware with variable energy management systems – running at full capacity only on an “as needed” basis
Participating
What we do internally is only part of the story, we also service the recycling industry and taken part in government recycling initiatives. To achieve this we have invested in specialised equipment to ensure we can safely and efficiently handle and move recyclable materials from collection points to recycling facilities and then as we move recycle items back into the market.
Future Sustainability Developments and Leadership
Mainfreight is actively committed to sustainability and environmentally friendly practices. We develop partnerships in the wider community to promote socially responsible environmental practices and show leadership in managing the use of finite resources.Our commitment to sustainability, safety, health and the environment has been, and continues to be, a fundamental element of our operating practices and our success to date.
