Inside a Sustainable Supply Chain

Many companies claim to care about sustainable practices. At Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA) our commitment goes beyond words and well into action. Just a few of the examples where we lead on sustainable practices: we work in a LEED Platinum headquarters and Zero Waste to Landfill plants, and we engineer the most fuel efficient trucks on the road. There are many more initiatives, including our supply chain practices where we minimize the environmental impact.

We build more trucks than any other original equipment manufacturer (OEM) in NAFTA – and that requires a lot of parts. Consider this: every six minutes a truck rolls off our production line with 2,500 parts inside. Each of those 2,500 parts have their own carbon foot print in the form of logistics and packaging.

Since 2014, we started measuring the environmental impact of our supply chain and taking steps to reduce it. To date we have executed 93 end-to-end projects that eliminate expendable packaging and minimize the distance traveled from our suppliers to our manufacturing locations. Here are some of the statistics:

• Reduced our annual CO2 emissions by 17.5 Million pounds - that's equivalent to drive a Class-8 truck 250 times around the world!
• Eliminated 540K cardboard boxes and 190K wooden pallets per year. To put it in perspective, the cost savings achieved by eliminating this dunnage is equivalent to our electricity bills from our Portland headquarters campus for one year!

An example of these projects is to improve the way our suppliers ship parts to us – moving from expendable packaging to right-size reusable totes that can be utilized directly at the assembly line. Not only are we eliminating the cardboard, but we also eliminate “touches” through excess handling and repacking.

Sustainability makes good business sense in our supply chain. We continue to pioneer innovative end-to-end delivery methods with our suppliers, and we aren’t done yet -- another 40 projects are in the works for 2017.