Green means lean

Declining energy resources and the resulting price increases have brought carbon footprint into sharp focus in recent years. Reducing energy consumption makes business sense – it saves money, enhances a company’s reputation and helps to tackle climate change. The field of logistics offers huge potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As Tom Delay, Chief Executive of The Carbon Trust, put it: “With very few exceptions, the supply chain represents the biggest area of sustainability impact and opportunity for a business.”

Sustainability savings

Supply chain savings through sustainability measures can be divided into those at the warehouse and those beyond it. In many respects, actions to reduce carbon footprint beyond the warehouse – such as software to optimise the loading of delivery vehicles to maximise use of space and optimise drop sequences, combined with fleet telematics to minimise delivery miles – are better known and understood.

Looking at the warehouse itself, perhaps the most obvious sustainability measure is the use of solar energy. Photovoltaic panels have been around for several decades but technical advances in recent years have improved their ROI enormously. The National Solar Centre of the Building Research Establishment (BRE) estimates that there are some 250,000 hectares of south-facing commercial roof space in the UK, which could provide approximately half of the country’s electricity demand.

Heating and lighting

Inside the warehouse building, lighting and heating are big users of energy. Typically, lighting will account for 15% of energy consumption, while heating or air conditioning will account for 35%. Lighting systems can be adjusted automatically to use only as much illumination as is required – for example, specific areas can be lit only when personnel enter them. Greater use can be made of daylight and energy-efficient LED lights. When it comes to heating or air conditioning, the use of good insulation materials, partitioning to segment buildings by temperature requirements and the use of air curtains can all help to reduce energy losses. In addition, simple construction and landscaping techniques can help to maximise heat from the sun in winter and minimise it in summer. Of course, the use of automated material handling in a distribution centre will lower the head count and naturally reduce the amount of energy used for lighting and heating, as well as the carbon emissions resulting from journeys to and from the warehouse.

Energy-efficient equipment 

Specifying energy-efficient handling equipment can have a huge impact on carbon footprint. Over the course of a year, a running motor can cost up to ten times its purchase price in energy, so the potential savings across multiple motors can be huge.

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Sophisticated software can ensure that drives operate only when required, and can also accumulate handling tasks for release in efficient batches. Simply reducing friction – through the use of high-quality bearings and gearboxes – can cut energy consumption, as can reducing the weight of mobile parts and the use of energy recuperation technology. 

Optimising material flows 

Computer control of logistics operations will optimise material flows and so naturally reduce the number and distance of transport tasks, thereby minimising energy use. Special handling techniques can also be employed to augment energy efficiency. For example, dynamic slotting – where loads are allocated locations within the store according to their mass and order frequency – can result in significant reductions in energy use. In addition – as the name suggests – paperless picking does away with a significant amount of paper wastage. Waste can also be reduced by eliminating single-use packaging by deploying innovative box-sealing solutions that avoid the use of tape or staples. Increased order accuracy through automated order picking secures additional green benefits in terms of lower returns. The importance of this advantage grows every year as the share of the retail market taken by e-commerce continues to rise.

E-commerce

The growth of e-commerce is one of two factors that stand out among the forces driving organisations to automate their intralogistics. According to the Office for National Statistics, average UK weekly spending online in August 2017 was over 15 per cent higher than in August 2016 and accounted for over 16 per cent of all retail spending. As e-tail logistics requires the picking and packing of individual customer orders rather than bulk shipping of goods for store replenishment, it demands more labour per item sold than bricks-and-mortar retail.

With reductions in the available workforce due to falling population levels in the developed world, shifting order profiles are driving the trend for more warehouse automation. In particular, robotic technology will increasingly be used to support or replace warehouse staff in order to increase productivity, especially because advances in its enabling technologies – including low-cost sensors, improved battery solutions and cloud computing – have brought down the cost of robotic automation.

The IoT

The second factor driving firms to automate their warehouses is an increasing understanding of the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the logistics sector, dubbed ‘Logistics 4.0’. Embedded chips and sensors turn handling equipment into cyber-physical systems that interact with their environment and respond to changes. The resulting data is stored to allow smart objects to remember certain sequences and access and this knowledge when required. It also enables forecasting for warehouse processes – from receiving, to picking and dispatch – in order to optimise the use of machinery and labour. Successful implementation of Logistics 4.0 will require warehouses to become more automated.

Sustainability benchmarking 

While it is easy to see that there are environmental benefits to be secured through warehouse automation, there is a need for companies that are looking to automate their operations to be able to compare the energy efficiency of various solutions. Fortunately, considerable work in this area has been undertaken by Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) and the Institut für Fördertechnik und Logistiksysteme (IFL) in Germany – working under the direction of the FEM (European Federation of Materials Handling) – to develop a common standard for forecasting the energy consumption of a materials handling system. AMHSA is the UK’s representative on these committees, making regular contributions and working hard alongside other panel members to deliver credible and positive standards for the automation industry. 

Once these energy efficiency benchmarking standards have been agreed and adopted by the FEM, it can be envisaged that all handling system suppliers will be required to give an energy efficiency rating for their equipment. Given the cost savings possible through sustainable systems, this may become one of the key decision factors in the procurement of a new handling solution.

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