By Lindsay Wood, Director, Resilienz Ltd.

 A few weeks ago, my newest grandson, Wyn, was born. Along with the joy of having this delightful wee man in the family, he has often illustrated things we big people take for granted, and  how fascinating and amazing they can be when you see them for the first time. Like all the angles where walls and ceiling come together, or the colours and shapes of fruit and packets and veggies on a kitchen bench.

So today I’m pondering how Wyn’s fresh-eyed approach might help our quest to decarbonise the trucking industry. Go Wyn! We know that to decarbonise we have to find new ways of doing things, and especially that will improve fuel efficiency, and even when some of those ‘things’ are the same old stuff we’ve been doing for years (like stacking boxes, or navigating roadworks, or waiting in rush hour traffic). So learning to look again with fresh eyes might not be so stupid after all and might even reveal oddities or opportunities we’ve just got too used to and so don’t see what we’re missing.

And it doesn’t get much more basic than a can of beans. I wonder who had the brainwave of tooling a tiny rebate in the bottom of the can, so it fits inside the top rim of another. It wasn’t that long ago no cans had that feature (and many still don’t), and they were a pain to stack – not lining up with the one below, easily falling off the stack.

Then some bright spark came up with that oh-so-simple solution which, with a tiny bit of extra machining, brings benefits right the way from the factory floor to the pantry shelf. Why didn’t anyone think of it a century ago?!

And it also brings what climate professionals call ‘co-benefits’ – in this case tiny savings in the height of the stacked cans (almost 5% or 5mm per can by my calcs), a fraction less cardboard in the boxes, and possibly, by a fluke, enabling some trucks or warehouses to stack boxes one layer higher because of that saving.

But what’s all this to do with saving fuel and greenhouse gas emissions?

You don’t need me to tell you that truckies see into every corner of the country, and I guarantee that if you spent a week on the road with fresh eyes you’d end up with a great list of potential efficiencies or savings. Maybe how the cones are laid out at roadworks, or the shape of some boxes you handle, or a message for architects and engineers on how they design truck docks, or sharing tricks to avoid rush hour traffic, or…

Another related way of sparking new ideas is humour, and if you followed Trucking Towards a Better Future 2021, you’ll know anyone who has a sense of humour is creative! Why?

Well, creativity and jokes always exploit unusual connections between things, and something funny will often spark creativity. You may recall the picture below from last year. Lots of people (me included) laugh on first seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and for some it sparks more creativity and more humour. Cool eh?

So, let’s not cringe at the idea of being creative, any more than we cringe at the idea of enjoying a good joke. And get those creative juices flowing and get some ideas down on paper!

Have you got a simple way of making the world better and more efficient, especially from a supply chain and general business perspective? Then enter the 2022 Trucking Toward a Better Future competition. To find out how, read the rules, and check the terms and conditions, click

here: https://www.nztrucking.co.nz/trucking-toward-a-better-future-get-your-entries-in-2/