2025 Supply Chain Sustainability Trends With Tom Raftery, Sustainability and Technology Evangelist - Ep. 51
In This Episode
Going into the new year, your customers, investors, and partners all have one thing in common: sustainability is a big concern. As natural disasters rage across the world, people are increasingly committed to preventing climate change—and they expect your business to do its part by reducing carbon emissions.
Tom Raftery, host of the Climate Confident and Sustainable Supply Chain podcasts, joins Lori on this episode of Unboxing Logistics to share some sustainability trends and predictions going into 2025.
Trend #1: Electric vehicles (EVs) will become more popular
Living in Spain, Tom has a close-up view of Europe’s environmental regulations. He explains that a variety of factors will combine to make electric vehicles the popular choice in 2025:
“All of the EV manufacturers who are selling into Europe are … going to be pushing EVs even more next year to make sure they're not hit with fines. When you look at that, and you look at the fact that the costs of EVs keep dropping year on year, you see that for fleet managers, they're far cheaper to own and operate than traditional diesel vehicles.”
Tom concludes, “I think at least here in Europe, but probably even more broadly, the penetration of EVs will ramp up significantly in 2025.”
Trend #2: Artificial intelligence (AI) will take center stage
When it comes to tracking scope 3 emissions, which aren’t directly produced by your business, Tom emphasizes the importance of partnerships, data sharing, and AI tools to organize all the information you collect.
“You need to be able to report the emissions coming from your suppliers. And that gets rather tricky because it's third-party information. You've got to talk with them ... [and that involves] taking in enormous amounts of data. What we'll start to see is AI helping organizations to work with that data that's coming in … [to] get the insights … [and] make recommendations.”
Trend #3: Sustainable organizations will win over stakeholders
According to Tom, making sustainable choices helps businesses attract and retain both customers and employees. “Your customers will … find you and they'll stay with you more easily if you have a good sustainability story to tell. … It's easier to find good employees … because people want to work for an organization that's doing good things.”
But the benefits of going green don’t end there. Tom explains that other stakeholders, including banks, insurance companies, and investors, also look more favorably at organizations that incorporate sustainability.
The bottom line? “Sustainability has gone from being a nice-to-have to now being a business imperative.”
Links
Transcript
Lori Boyer 00:00
Welcome to Unboxing Logistics. I'm your host, Lori Boyer from EasyPost, and today we are going to be talking about one of the big topics in the industry, something that's always near and dear to my heart. We are going to be going into sustainability. Which of course we've talked about before in the past.
You here in the Unboxing Logistics community love this topic. But what I'm really wanting to get into is kind of what we are seeing happen in 2025. So for that purpose I have brought in an amazing guest. So, buckle up, get ready today, because we are going to be learning from the one and only, the great Tom Raftery.
He is here all the way from sunny Spain to talk to us about what he is, you know, foreseeing for the upcoming year. Tom, introduce yourself to our community a little bit.
Tom Raftery 00:55
Hi folks. Thanks for the interest as well as the invitation. My name is Tom Raftery, as Lori said. I've been working at the intersection of technology and sustainability now since I want to say the mid 2000s, around 2005, 2006, roughly actually around the time that the Inconvenient Truth movie came out.
So around that time I got into it as well. Coincidentally, but I got into it. At the time I was developing a data center and I was designing the data center to be hyper energy efficient. And so I got into the green space. I decided as well as developing the data center, it would be a cool idea to open source the development of the data center, because I had a social media background.
So we started documenting online the full build out of the data center, everything from the arrival of the backhoes on site to dig out the foundations through to the delivery of customer kit. And so that kind of got me a name for myself in the green energy space. And it kind of went from there. In 2008, then I left Ireland, where I was living at the time, and moved here to Spain, where I am now.
And at the time, I didn't speak Spanish very well, so I needed a job that would allow me to work remotely in English. And so, I landed a job as an industry analyst for a firm called Red Monk and within Red Monk, I led the practice dealing with energy and sustainability, which we termed Green Monk. And so I led the research in that practice through to 2016 when I was recruited into SAP. And within SAP, I worked very much in sustainability and technology as well.
But there in SAP, I worked for the supply chain organization. So it was a combination of supply chain, technology, sustainability. Stayed there until 22 when I was impacted by the tech layoffs, unfortunately. But while I was there, I set up two podcasts, and that's part of the reason why I'm here today. One of the podcasts, I called it Climate Confident, and I was dealing with climate issues, and that's still going.
And the other one was at the time called the Digital Supply Chain Podcast, but I rebranded it since. And it's now called the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast. Both of those podcasts go out once a week, every week. I won't say 52 weeks of the year, cause I tend to take a couple of weeks off for summer and winter, but 48 weeks of the year.
So there's 48 episodes go out, sometimes 49, depending on how busy I, I, I make myself or how intrepid, I feel. And so, new episode of Sustainable Supply Chain every Monday, 7am CET. New episode of the Climate Confident podcast every Wednesday, 7am CET.
Lori Boyer 03:43
Absolutely recommend them. Such great podcasts. And you are amazing for putting them out as regularly as you do.
I'm just hands off to you. We'll include links to those in the description. So, make sure that you check them out. You know, Tom is fantastic and just so smart. So, Tom, this season on the podcast, one thing we're doing that I have just loved, is I'm asking guests to share someone else in the industry that you really admire, or a role, maybe, in the industry that you admire.
And I've just learned so much and really connected with people on that. So, Tom, who, who is someone, or what is a role you really admire in the industry?
Tom Raftery 04:25
That's a great question, Lori, and I got to say, it's not what I can answer. What I mean by that is there are so many people who do such great work in the space.
I mean, if I think of Sherry Heinish, for example, she works for EY now. She does great stuff with her Supply Chain Revolution podcast. If I think of Scott Luton, who does great stuff with the Supply Chain Now organization. Over on LinkedIn, if I think of David Schillingford, and, you know, there's more and more.
I could go on all day. You know, this is a great industry to be in because there are so many great people doing such fantastic work all the time. It would be unfair to pick any one of them out and say, you know, that they're the best. So there's hundreds. I mean, even the guests I've had on the podcast, people like John Sickert from Canaxis and more.
I mean, it's, it just goes on and on and on. It's fantastic.
Lori Boyer 05:18
It is. One of the privileges of hosting a podcast that I'm sure you experience as well is meeting so many incredible people. The industry is amazing. And I always say the industry, this is an industry that's huge on connection and on creating a community.
And you know, there's really not a greater way to do it than, you know, reaching out and whether it's LinkedIn or podcasts or whatever it is.
Tom Raftery 05:43
It's great. I mean, I, I, I run my first podcast from 2005 to 2007 or 2008. I wanna think it was, and it was incredible. From my Rolodex. I just, I met so many really, really interesting people and made such great connections there and continue to, to this day. Yeah, it's fantastic.
Lori Boyer 06:01
Yeah, that's great. Okay, so another thing that we're doing this season is, you know, AI is just a huge topic as you know, and you're coming from a tech background. Everyone talks about it, every show we go to every, you know, everybody's going on and on about it. But one thing, you know that a lot of us find as, you know, when we're a little more experienced or we kind of have some expertise is when you look at answers, say from like ChatGPT.
Sometimes, you know, it can get you a good start, but often you need kind of that expert's eye to look at it and to be able to know where it's off, where it's right, where it's wrong. So I'm asking a question of ChatGPT and then reading it back to my experts here, in this case for you, Tom, and just kind of getting your take on it.
It's a reality check for our AI. Is it on? Did it miss something? Was it, you know, sometimes it's great. And kind of grading it from an A to an F. So, are you ready for this?
Tom Raftery 07:01
Go for it.
Lori Boyer 07:02
Okay, I'm excited. All right, I asked ChatGPT, what do you believe will be the most commonly implemented sustainability initiatives in the logistics industry, supply chain industry in 2025?
This is what it came up with. So its top three. Number one, it thought that we would have a big transition to electric and alternative fuel vehicles. Number two, that we would have a much greater implementation of sustainable packaging. And number three, that carbon emission tracking and reporting would go up.
Okay. So I'd love to hear your, your feedback. So electric vehicles. Seems like they were really big, at least here in the U.S. like a couple of years ago and we've kind of slowed down a little bit. What are you seeing with electric vehicles?
Tom Raftery 07:55
Yeah, electric vehicles is an interesting one because the press keeps reporting that the sales are dipping, but if you look at the data, the sales figures are actually up and they keep going up year on year on year.
And so the, the sales figures for this year are coming in at over 20 percent globally, which is higher than last year. So they are on the increase. Next year, they're going to increase even more. And there's a particular reason for that. So, in Europe in 2020, the rules around emissions from fleets of vehicles there was rules.
I, I, I'll get the numbers wrong here, but I'll be in the correct ballpark. So, the EU mandated that the OEMs, the manufacturers, had to have a, an average across the fleet of vehicles they sell of 120 grams CO2 per kilometer driven. Okay. Now to give you an idea, when I bought my Prius back in 2008, It had an average fuel efficiency of 117 grams CO2 per kilometer.
So this 120 grams CO2 per kilometer was slightly more, slightly more efficient than a Prius. So all the manufacturers had to have an average of this across their entire fleets, okay, in 2020. And if they went over that, they were hit with fines. And so that's been the case from 2020 to 2024. Now, coming into 2025, that 120 grams CO2 drops to around 90 or 95.
I don't, like I said, I'll get the numbers wrong, but I'm in the ballpark. So, all of the EV manufacturers who are selling into Europe are going to be hit with this drop in the emissions across their average. So they're going to be pushing EVs even more next year to make sure they're not hit with fines.
And so when you look at that, and you look at the fact that the costs of EVs keeps dropping year on year, you see that for fleet managers, they're far cheaper to own and operate than traditional diesel vehicles. I do think that ChatGPT's got that one right. I think at least here in Europe, but probably even more broadly, the, the penetration of EVs will ramp up significantly in 2025.
Lori Boyer 10:15
Oh, that is super interesting. Great insights. So what about number two then? Packaging, that sustainable packaging is going to be big, big this year. I mean, we've got it out there already.
Tom Raftery 10:27
Yeah, I mean, sustainable packaging is doing quite well. I'm not sure, I don't see any huge push for it to go, you know, massively bigger in 2025.
It's one of those things that's ramping up, you know, nice and slowly and, and surely, but I don't, I don't see any, I could be missing something. Maybe ChatGPT knows something I don't.
Lori Boyer 10:50
Yeah, yeah, probably not, Tom.
Tom Raftery 10:53
But it will, it will get better, but I'm not sure it'll leap forward to any great extent in 2025.
Lori Boyer 10:59
We'll say that one's not quite on, a little bit of a miss. So I thought it was interesting that the third one was more about tracking and reporting than anything, that people would be more diligent about their carbon emission tracking and reporting. Are you seeing a trend that way?
Tom Raftery 11:14
Well, again, there's legislative regulations coming down the line, and companies are going to have to be more rigorous around the reporting.
So that will ramp up, yeah. Because, you know, there's laws now against, at least here in Europe, again, there's laws against greenwashing, for example. And companies are going to be hit with that if, if they, if they do. The CS triple D is coming into force, which requires, which mandates reporting as well.
I suspect in a lot of organizations, what we'll see, is we'll see a shift. Because of the increased rigor required of reporting, we'll see a shift of the function of the corporate sustainability officer, which traditionally in many cases has reported into the chief marketing officer's office, which, you know, tells its own story right there.
Lori Boyer 12:09
Huh. That's huge.
Tom Raftery 12:11
I can see in a lot of organizations that a move to go into the chief finance officers organization because of the increased rigor demanded of the reporting. So, yeah I do, I do think that one is, is, is, on, on ball, I think, you know, there will be a definite increase in the amount of reporting and measurement and reporting of emissions next year.
Lori Boyer 12:35
That's interesting. Yeah. So what's missing, Tom?
Tom Raftery 12:38
What's missing there is any mention of AI or IOT or blockchain. I'm not sure there'll be any huge increase in blockchain. Again, it's one of these ones like packaging that's increasing slowly, but surely. But AI and IOT are certainly booming. I mean, this is why we're talking about AI. And IOT again, it's one of these ones. I don't see a huge leap forward in IOT, but it's just, it's, it's, you know, it's increasing incredibly for tracking and tracing, particularly, you know, it's. And you need AI to take in all that data from the sensors and make sense of it. And, you know, spit out insights based on all the data that's coming in.
Lori Boyer 13:18
So is AI then you feel like it has a fairly strong role when it comes to kind of our sustainability and roles there because it does just help us have that understanding and information more readily available.
Tom Raftery 13:31
Exactly. It goes back to that Peter Drucker saw that everyone throws out all the time, you know, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And everyone throws it out because it's true, you know, you know, you need to and you need to have those sensors in place.
You need to know what's going on. You need, for a lot of the sustainability reporting, you need to be able to report out to scope three increasingly, which means you need to be able to report the emissions coming from your suppliers. And that gets rather tricky because it's third party information.
You've got to talk with them. So a lot of it is around increasing partnerships and cooperation. And, you know, and it's taking in enormous amounts of data. And what we'll start to see then is AI helping organizations to work with that data that's coming in. And as I said, get the insights from that, but also make recommendations based on that.
So you could see, for example, if you're looking out across a list of suppliers for some particular thing, it might be a shipment, it might be packaging, it might be whatever. And you're looking at across your supplier base. Your AI might be able to say, well, this particular supplier has an on time rate of 95%, a cost of whatever dollars it is, and their emissions per kilometer driven or per mile driven are Y, which is lower than the others in the space.
So you start looking at these three different axes, not just money, not just on time rate, but also emissions from their suppliers. And if you're using AI for that, it'll, it'll parse through, you know, potentially thousands of suppliers and find the optimum for you.
Lori Boyer 15:11
That's fantastic. So, okay. Really great summary there.
What would you give it on a grade? We'll, we'll put on professor Raftery's hat here. You know, what, what did you give it as a grade? A to F. A to F is how we do it here in the U.S. I'm not sure how you do it in Ireland.
Tom Raftery 15:27
I'd say we'll give it a strong B.
Lori Boyer 15:28
Okay, that's about where most of my experts are having it land.
So, out there in the community, that's kind of what you can guess. You know, don't go off and just think that you've got it all. A round of B. So, that's fantastic. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about moving into 2025. We've kind of talked about predictions already in our discussion with AI. But, you know, what do you think is driving, I guess, the sustainability movement right now?
What is it going to be regulations? Is it going to be consumer expectations? You know, what do you see are the biggest impacts as we're going into 2025?
Tom Raftery 16:07
There is a few things. So there's yes, consumer expectations is a big one, because obviously, if you are, if you have a good sustainability story that you can tell and back it up with data, then obviously that'll make the cost of customer acquisition, it'll reduce it, and customer retention, it'll reduce that as well.
Your customers will stay with you. So they'll, they'll find you and they'll stay with you more easily if you have a good sustainability story to tell.
Lori Boyer 16:34
I was going to say that goes back into what you mentioned about why people are reporting into the seat, the chief marketing officer, right? So it is a good story.
Tom Raftery 16:40
It's, it's not just customer acquisition, but it's the cost of customer acquisition. So hence there's a finance aspect to it too, because you need to make a business case for this kind of thing for it to stick. And so, yeah, cost of customer acquisition will drop, but cost of customer retention will also drop.
But it's not just that. So there's several other stakeholders who are involved in this space as well. If we think of the employees of your organization. I had an episode of the podcast that I had with a guy called Ken Pucker about a year ago or so now. And Ken's the former COO of Timberland. And he was their COO when they started doing their emissions reporting back in the early 2000s.
So they were very early in this space. And he said, one of the things that amazed him was when they started doing this, when they would advertise a vacancy in the organization, he said the caliber of people who would apply for that role was way higher than they would have expected. And it was because they had this name of being an organization with a good sustainability story. So same kind of thing for your employees. You're now reducing your cost of employee recruitment and employee retention. So it's easier to find good employees, again, if you have a good sustainability story to tell, because people want to work an organization that's doing good things. We all do, you know.
Lori Boyer 18:17
I, you know, I've asked people in the past, sometimes in getting to know you, what would you do if you, you know, won the lottery? And a lot of people say they'd like to start a company or an organization where they're helping others. And, but you know, there are. Being a sustainable, you know, a company with that focus, it's what people want. I love that point, Tom. That's great.
Tom Raftery 18:36
Exactly. And then there's, there's other stakeholders like your banks. So again, if you have a good sustainability story, your bank will, your, your cost of capital from your bank should be reduced. Because the banks want to have green projects and green customers in their portfolios so they can say, look, here's our portfolio.
Here's how many green projects and prospects and customers we have in our portfolio. It looks good for them for their reporting for their scope three. Same with insurance companies.
So your cost of insurance, your cost of banking should fall if you have this good sustainability story to tell. Also, the, your, your investors, investors are looking for companies to invest in.
So if you're a publicly traded company, this should reflect well, again, for your, for investors. Because the boards, again, boards are looking for this. So there's, there's pressure coming from boards to, to reduce sustainability for this exact reason. So, you know, there's, there's so many different stakeholders who are looking at this. This is why sustainability has gone from being kind of a nice to have, and now being, you know, a business imperative.
Lori Boyer 19:46
Yeah, absolutely. Where do you feel like, you know, we've done really well with implementing, you know, sustainability and where do you feel like kind of in the industry, we're still falling short?
Tom Raftery 20:01
Where have we done really well?
Lori Boyer 20:02
Is that nowhere? Oh, no! Where have we done a little better than we have in other areas? How about that?
Tom Raftery 20:11
Yeah, I, I don't think we've done really well anywhere. So our report card would say must do more, work harder. So we, we really need to to get the emissions from transportation down.
And we have the technology, you know, the old, the old 6 million dollar man quote, we have the technology, we can rebuild them. We have the technology. I mean, the, the, the cost. I mean, deploying things like telematics, that's, that's, table stakes for this kind of stuff, because sensors, data, information, all that kind of stuff we talked about earlier.
Route planning, optimizing routes. Again, that's been done for a good while now. That's great. That's fantastic. But moving away from fossil fuels to electric transportation, that's I mean, that's still a long way from where it should be. And the thing is, the economics of doing it all stack up now.
The, yes, the upfront cost of EVs is higher still, but the operating cost of them is way lower. And also the maintenance cost, I guess, if you build that in, if you call that the operating cost, then it's included in that. But if you, if you see that as a separate line item, maintenance costs of EVs are about 50 percent what they are for fossil fuel vehicles.
So your cost per mile and your cost for maintenance is significantly lower. They're also more secure vehicles. You know, that's another nice thing. And the, I mean, Geotab put out a report just in the last few days talking about EVs. And in particular, they talked about the lifetime of the batteries of EVs.
And so from this report, they said from the data of analyzing 10,000 vehicles over multiple years on the Geotab platform, they've seen 10,000 EVs. that the batteries in EVs typically lose about 1.8 percent of capacity every year. So after 10 years, they've lost about 18 percent of their original capacity.
Now, how many fleets do you know that operate vehicles that are 10 years old?
Lori Boyer 22:27
Yeah, right.
Tom Raftery 22:28
You know?
Lori Boyer 22:29
Exactly.
Tom Raftery 22:30
So, and, and 18 percent after 10 years, they're still at 82 percent of original capacity.
Lori Boyer 22:35
So, Tom, if it makes sense, you know, and we've got the technology, why aren't, why isn't it not happening?
Tom Raftery 22:42
I think a lot of it is, we fear change.
Also, there's an aspect as well of the EV makers, when they moved into this space, the likes of Tesla was one of the first big ones initially, obviously. They moved in with their Model S first, and then their Model 3. Those are not really commercial vehicles, unless you're talking about sales fleets. So getting into light commercial vehicles and then the, the, the class eights and, and in all those in between, that's taking a little longer.
And then there's the deployment of charging infrastructure for particularly the class eight vehicles. That's only starting to be rolled out. So I can understand why, you know, there aren't that many big electric trucks out there. But commercial vans now, they should, they should be electric at this point because they charge on standard chargers.
And, you know, there, there are very few places now where it's hard to find a standard charger. In any case, most commercial fleets, particularly the light vehicles light commercial vehicles, most of those come back to base every evening. And there's enough range in those, you know, unless you're doing 500 miles every day, which is, which would be very unusual.
Most of those would have enough range to do the full day without having to recharge.
Lori Boyer 24:04
So in the U.S.We have a little bit of challenge because we do have such long routes. and that, you know, going from point to point, we have some massive distances. I think EVs for that purpose have not been quite useful in the U.S. yet. But in the last mile in the city, are super, super useful. Do you agree or disagree with me?
Tom Raftery 24:27
Yes and no. As in, yes around the city, absolutely. I'm just, after putting my money down on a new EV for myself in the last week or so, I'm taking delivery next week. It's a Kia EV3. And the Kia EV3 has a range of about 370 miles and it has a 30 minute recharge time.
So if I'm after driving 370 miles, I'll want a 30 minute break. And in many cases, in many cases it's mandated for, for, you know, commercial drivers. So if I drive 370 miles, plug it in for 30 minutes, go and have a rest break, bite to eat, cup of coffee after 30 minutes, car's full again, and off I go for the next one.
Lori Boyer 25:11
What about autonomous vehicles, Tom? Do you see that coming around into play?
We're getting a little tiny bit of those tastes here. We've got some of the, you know, Uber and Lyft that are now autonomous. Long, long haul routes. Do you see autonomous vehicles coming into play at some point?
Tom Raftery 25:31
Yeah, potentially. I mean, I think, I think the long haul routes are actually where they'll happen first.
Well, no, that's not true. I think where they'll happen first is in places where you have bounded geofenced areas. So think of mines and think of ports and think of within warehouses, you know, so they're not going out in public roads, for example. That's, you know, that's low hanging fruit right there.
Okay. And then when you're on public routes, I think, yes, the, the long distance trucking will will go autonomous before driving around within cities. So, when you're on interstates and highways, you know and, and you have trains of them, essentially going. The, the advantage they'll have over the railroad infrastructure is when they're autonomous, and when they're able to go like that, long fleets of them, then the cost comes way, way, way, way down.
And so, and then what I would see is they would go to distribution centers, and from there, they'd be unloaded and put into smaller EVs and just moved around by human drivers at that point, for now. And of course, because they'd, because it'd be cheaper than rail, what would happen is it steals some of the business from rail and so they'd increase the amount of local distribution from these distribution centers with humans driving, you know, as, as I say, for now, at least. I think it'll be quite a while before we have autonomous vehicles doing last mile distribution.
Lori Boyer 27:02
I think you're right. I think, especially in really busy urban centers, that's going to be rough. So.
Tom Raftery 27:08
And I think what they will do is they'll shift. They, they'll shift the human factor away from the long distance trucking and more to the shorter haul trucking, which I think for, for drivers anyway, is probably nicer.
I mean, maybe there are some drivers out there who absolutely love the long distance driving, but for, for, for many of them, what will happen is they'll be going shorter routes, taking as I say, from the distribution centers to last mile delivery, et cetera. And so for many drivers, it would mean they'd be able to get home every night, which might be a nice thing.
Lori Boyer 27:44
And yeah, with the labor challenges we face in this industry, anything you can do to make the job more enjoyable is great. So we've kind of talked about the carrier side. Let's talk about, you know, we have a lot of shippers in our audience as well. What are your recommendations? So, you know, We have all sizes of people who listen.
How would you recommend, so let's say for 2025, let's say you've got, you know, step one, step two, step three, you know, where, where do you recommend people start in their sustainability efforts if they've already done some things, you know, I guess, what are the stepping stones in your mind?
Tom Raftery 28:21
Yeah, there's a, there's a few things.
I mean, you can't really go on a sustainability journey unless you've started on a digitization effort because again, back to the original point, you know, you have to be able to measure it before you can manage it and to be able to measure it properly, it needs to be in a digital format. So you need to be, you need to be rolling out digital solutions, digitizing your, your, your platforms.
Lori Boyer 28:45
Okay, so I'm going to stop you because that was really cool. That was a great truth bomb there from you. You cannot go on a sustainability journey unless you first start your digital journey. Was that correct? How you said that? Love that. Super smart. Put that there as a quote. So yeah, go ahead.
Explain. So we need to get, you can't just throw stuff at the wall and be like, oh, hopefully that's helping. So go ahead.
Tom Raftery 29:12
And then you need to start setting goals for yourself. You know, you need to say, okay, by 2030, I want to get to here. By 2035, I want to get to here. And then you need to backfill those targets with steps to get there.
And then, so you need to, roll up, roll out your, your goals and then roll out your, as I say, your steps to get there. You need to measure your emissions, start with your scope one and two, so the emissions from your own organization. And then start working on your scope three. But you know, that's, that's, if you haven't started in scope one and two, do that first.
And when you've got that nailed, then worry about your scope 3.
Lori Boyer 29:58
You think they should be hiring someone specifically to be working on their ESG, you know, sustainability kind of stuff?
Tom Raftery 30:05
It wouldn't hurt. I, I think, I mean, there's a lot of information out there if you, if you search for it, but I do think you probably, depending on the size of the organization, but you do probably need someone dedicated to it.
Someone or, you know, send someone from the organization on a course or something like that. It does need, it does need a dedicated resource, I feel.
Lori Boyer 30:28
Okay. I agree with that. I think ideally, absolutely you should. But if you can't, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do sustainability efforts.
Tom Raftery 30:38
Google is your friend there, or ChatGPT in this case. It's getting a B as we said, so that's good.
Lori Boyer 30:42
It's a B, so that's right. You don't have the person in house. That would get you the A.
Tom Raftery 30:47
So, once you have your goals and everything set, and you have digitized a bit, then you need to start measuring. And start measuring your emissions, and report those emissions against the goals that you set for yourself.
Then you need to start working on your low hanging fruit. So some easy wins. One of the, one of the easiest is to electrify as much as you can. So electrify your transportation, electrify your heating and cooling, electrify your cooking, if you have a kitchen. You know, electrify everything you can and then, contract a renewable energy supplier and straight away, boom, you know, that's, that's, that's real low hanging fruit stuff.
Straight away, you've done away with a huge amount of your scope one and two emissions just by doing that. And after that, I think one of the, one of the most effective things you can do as an organization, and a lot of people are going to get uncomfortable when I say this. You can tie your executive's remuneration to emissions reduction KPIs.
Lori Boyer 32:07
Wow. Yeah, that's right. You tell it like it is, Tom. I love it.
Tom Raftery 32:14
And right there, right there, you'll start to see some results.
Lori Boyer 32:18
People are going to care. That's absolutely right. And you know, we have seen, you know, I was speaking with Dr. Chris Caplice of MIT transportation, great guy, but he was mentioning how a lot of these companies who have had initiatives were starting to come due, you know, or they'd set their goals.
And so we are going to be seeing more and more emphasis. And as it gets kind of that executive level, I mean, that's, that's really huge. So we are just about out of time. I feel like Tom, you and I, we need to sit down sometime. I need to come visit you in Spain. So because you just have so many great insights.
Anything else you feel like we've missed or anything you wish people knew or, going into 2025, final tips.
Tom Raftery 33:01
Yeah, I mean, another couple of things you could do as an organization is set an internal carbon price for projects. So once you've started measuring your emissions, you can then tie it to individual projects within the organization and then mandate that every organization, sorry, that every project within the organization does a carbon price. And then set a price for that carbon.
I don't know, set a 20 dollars a ton or 60 dollars a ton or whatever it is, just set a price on it, collect the money from each of those. And use that money, ring fence it, for sustainability projects within the organization, maybe you use it to roll out chargers in your car park for your employees or something similar, you know, but make sure that it's it's taken.
And then you're, you're by that you're, you're getting people to, to actually have an interest in the amount of carbon that's in their projects and try and minimize it because it's coming out of their carbon budget. Every department gets a carbon budget, for example, you know, so do these kinds of initiatives as well and, and even gamify it across departments, across sites, if you have multiple sites, you know, all that kind of thing.
Lori Boyer 34:10
Absolutely works that it. You know, and just the awareness of people knowing and thinking about it. And it goes back to what you said earlier, Tom, about people feeling good about working somewhere that is making a difference. And the great news I feel like with everything with the sustainability is it does make business sense. Back to what you said at the very beginning, being sustainable is tied to efficiency so much.
And that usually is going to produce dollars for you. You are going to get better with investors and bankers and, and you're going to be the supplier that people want to use for their scope three. And so yeah, fantastic insights, Tom. If our audience wants to connect with you learn from you, what, you know, how can they learn more about you?
LinkedIn, where, where should they reach out?
Tom Raftery 35:01
Sure. Yeah. LinkedIn is always a good one. Quite active there. I'm also no longer posting on Twitter, so I've, I've moved away from there because it's become a toxic hellscape.
Lori Boyer 35:12
Yes, it is! It's scary!
Tom Raftery 35:14
I'm now on Threads and Blue Sky. And in fact, on, on BlueSky, I created what's called a starter pack for Supply Chain.
So if you do come into BlueSky and you're looking for your tribe, check out the Supply Chain starter pack, and that'll give you a list of people in Supply Chain who are on BlueSky, and straight away you'll find people, you know, to, to follow and get sort of relevant feeds of information for you. So it becomes useful off the bat.
Lori Boyer 35:44
That's perfect. As we said, communities critical in this industry, find your tribe. Love that phrase. And of course you got to check out Tom's podcast. Fantastic. We'll link them below. Thank you again for being here. This has been fantastic.
Tom Raftery 36:01
No, thanks for inviting me, Lori. And thanks everyone. If you've, if you've lasted this long, well done.
Thank you for the interest.
Lori Boyer 36:08
Well, thanks. See you next time.