By Lindsay Wood, director of Resilienz Ltd

Right on cue, with a week left in the Trucking Toward a Better Future competition, a brand-new high-level freight strategy points directly at lots of things we can think about. And it opens a field crying out for the insights and ideas that can be offered by so many truckers, warehouse crews, mechanics, and everyone in the industry.

The Sustainable Business Council is made up of around 100 large companies intent on steering business to a truly sustainable future, and the Council‘s Freight Group (including lots of names you‘d recognise) has just released its Low carbon freight pathway, an ambitious decarbonisation strategy running right through to 2050.

So where do we come in with such big stuff going on? Well, for starters, the strategy sets the scene just right for us: “A smooth transition plan requires a mix of short-term initiatives that can be undertaken by individual freight and logistics companies in the next five years.”

You might even recall New Zealand Trucking editor Dave McCoid and I chatting along those lines in the video right at the start!

And The Sustainable Business Council says we need “Aggressive and early action by major users.” So, c‘mon all you people, we need ideas that can be quickly deployed – big or small, sane or crazy!

The strategy highlights the value of better integration of trucking, rail and shipping, but it also splits the 30-year time-frame into three ‘Horizons‘ – and guess what, Horizon 1 sets a stage just for us: the first five years, with a focus on fleet efficiency in routes, in operations, through business collaborating and so on. 

And get a load of this list of ‘Emissions reduction opportunities‘. There‘s plenty there to get our grey matter working on!

If you want a sense of how useful these might be, check out the chart below. No, it‘s not an artist‘s impression of a foggy sunrise on the Rimutakas, it‘s tracking the emissions savings of different strategies between now and 2050.

Please take special note of the next five years (circled), before the big hits from batteries (green), biodiesel (red) and hydrogen (navy); because that‘s where ideas like yours are most desperately needed. 

And wouldn‘t it be great to show the government we can do a heap better than the Ministry of Transport predictions (black line), and that the nation‘s truckers can help us get sliding down the much faster industry route (green). How cool would that be!

So, team of 20,000, there we have it. Just when we might have felt we were running out of stuff to think about, a spotlight shines on exactly the area where you can make a great contribution.

Let those mental juices flow one more time, and get your entries in by 30 April! Dave and I are excited to see what you come up with!

Click here to find out more about the Trucking Toward a Better Future competition and get your entries in: https://nztrucking.co.nz/trucking-toward-a-better-future-calling-all-truckers-and-trucking-people.