2Sustain

By the end of 2011, PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay North America division will have the largest fleet of commercial all-electric trucks in North America.

Frito-Lay will be rolling out five new electric trucks in New York City this month. 21 more will be deployed this year. After that, an additional 150 will join the fleet next year.

The trucks, designed by Smith Electric Vehicles, generate zero tailpipe emissions and operate for up to 100 miles on a single charge. Smith Electric is a leader in the development of commercial electric trucks designed to operate at peak effectiveness in urban environments, and the company produces the Newton, which is the only all-electric commercial truck on the market. (more…)

Even though a federal judge is expected to lift the injunction that has stalled the Clean Truck Program at the Port of Los Angeles, officials there said last week that they will not immediately enforce a ban on freight haulers who don’t comply with the program’s strict requirements.

According to dailybreeze.com, the Port officials are delaying the ban so that trucking companies have enough time to comply with provisions of the program that were deemed last month to be legal by a US District Judge. (more…)

Because carbon accounting is both technical and complex, the trucking industry needs to adopt a more standardized approach to improve reporting of its greenhouse gas emissions, according to the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI).

The ATRI reviewed and analyzed a range of greenhouse gas reporting tools and emissions models to assess their consistency and applicability to the trucking industry, and the organization found that current methods of carbon accounting are often inadequate for today’s U.S. trucking fleets. (more…)

Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) recently consolidated three facilities in the Northwest (Tualatin, The Dalles and Woodland, Washington) into a single plant in Wilsonville, Oregon, and the company says this move has helped it maximize efficiencies in its supply chain while minimizing its environmental footprint overall.

How? The company points out that by creating additional storage space for Coca-Cola products in Wilsonville, it can ship Dasani water directly from the bottling facility instead of having it bottled, shipped to other facilities for storage and then shipped to retailers. According to CCE, reconfiguring this part of the production cycle will save an average of 112 truckloads and 79,000 truck miles every year. (more…)

Cisco is in the process of developing a comprehensive sustainable value chain strategy that includes a broad-based green packaging initiative. And, early results from this “packaging diet” are “sensational, to say the least,” reports Claudia Girrbach at Greener Computing earlier this week.

For example: (more…)