Net-Zero Journey with Greenly

With 70% of a company's emissions embedded in their supply chain practices, it's critical that pallets are managed responsibly. 48forty recently partnered with globally-focused third party carbon strategist Greenly to calculate our carbon footprint and develop a credible net-zero action plan. Listen in as Greenly's Climate Expert Cindy Chauvin and 48forty's ESG Director Jess Bonsall discuss this process and how it benefits our customers.

What is Greenly?

Cindy Chauvin (CC): Greenly is both a platform (so a website) and a team of climate experts. We use our platform to help our clients calculate their carbon emissions in the easiest way. We have more than 1,000 clients at the moment, most of them in Europe and more and more in the United States.

Jess Bonsall (JB): We're seeing more and more states as well as the federal government leaning in to understand how a company's operations impact the environment from an emission standpoint.

So for us, it was really about staying ahead of the regulatory drivers, requiring companies to disclose emissions. We wanted to do that with a partner who understood how to guide companies through this process, how to help companies set achievable goals to reduce emissions over time.

What is the net-zero contributor certification process?

CC: The net-zero contributor certification process aims at helping our clients beyond the net-zero path. So it has different pillars. One of them is to engage their employees, so to train employees on what is climate change, what is at stake and what can be done. Another pillar is to engage suppliers. So our clients work with their own suppliers in order to reduce their suppliers' footprint and to work hand in hand on that topic. Another pillar is to reduce their own emissions. And to that end, what we do is that we select the most significant emissions categories and we calculate potential reduction actions with our clients. This way we can have a strategy that precisely says from one year to another how much they can reduce.

Why did 48forty undertake this process?

JB: For us, net-zero contributor certification was about building a credible net-zero action plan. While we didn't have the opportunity to achieve our net-zero contributor certification in our first year of review, it gave us a really great opportunity to have conversations about understanding our emissions profile, understanding what we can control, and understanding where we need to lean in to work on things over time. It brought our executive leadership team into the conversation and really helped us align around the fact that this isn't an overnight process. It's something that takes time and for us to get to a space to have our emissions profile really on par with other global companies looking to examine and better understand these types of information at this time that we have work to do and we're ready to lean in and and really set those actions in place.

CC: Despite the fact that the targets was not reached for 48forty, I'm very confident that this company is on a great climate strategy and I'm very excited to see what happens in the future.

How do 48forty customers benefit?

JB: Our customers benefit from our partnership because it gives us the opportunity to provide very transparent and verified data around our emissions profile. It's not work that's just been done in house. This is work that we've had the opportunity to have reviewed and have verified. And this is important when we see groups like the Security Exchange Commission or the SEC releasing requirements that bring companies to be sharing emissions data alongside their financial data. Those companies need to have assurance that the information that they're sharing has been verified and can withstand regulatory scrutiny.

If you think about the fact that 70% of the company's emissions are embedded in their supply chain practices, when we as a partner, a supply chain partner to our customers, can come to our customers and say, this is our carbon footprint, this is the emission profile of our product, and this is our action plan to reduce those emissions over time. It creates a really powerful partnership for our customers.

We're on this journey with them together, and we're supporting them to lean in and better understand how operations impact the environment from an emission standpoint.

For more sustainability insights, visit planet.48forty.com.