Product Transportation

The transportation of goods from the location we purchase them, to our distribution centers and on to stores represented about 13% of our total GHG emissions. We also count the impacts of shipping goods directly to customers who order via our catalog or through REI.com and REI-OUTLET.com and we report that as "Direct Fulfillment".

Product Transportation (Tons CO₂)

Highlights

In 2007 product transportation accounted for 13 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions, or a total of 13,434 tons. Over the course of the year we began implementing strategies to reduce these impacts. Our new eastern region distribution center will help lessen impacts due to more efficient delivery to east coast stores and customers residing east of the Mississippi River. However, some of the advantage is countered by transporting the products to Bedford.

Challenges

Shipping products from far away distances has impacts and the method of transportation affects efficiency. For example, planning ahead and not sending products by air but by cargo ship has less GHG emissions. As we grow we will need to keep pressure on efficient transportation.

Looking Forward

We will work with logistics suppliers to measure individual company performance and ask them to compete on their GHG emissions performance and on traditional metrics, such as on-time delivery. This is a new area for many suppliers; however we have been pleased with the interest from the shipping industry to do their part.

Methodology

To create our GHG inventory, we take ownership of the carbon impacts for the shipment of goods that we own, or from the point where we schedule and control the transportation, all the way through our distribution centers and on to stores. The impacts of shipments directly to customers for internet or catalog orders are reported in the "Direct Fulfillment" section.

This section reports on REI emissions in three areas: goods inbound (from vendors or factories to our distribution centers or stores); good outbound (from our Distribution centers to stores) and intra-company transfers (shipments from one store to another or back to a distribution center).

Goods Inbound

This category has three sub-sections:

Sea shipments — This category primarily includes shipments of REI brand gear and apparel from overseas factories to U.S. ports and then to our distribution centers. We computed the impact of container loads based on the container-miles. We then use CO₂ per container mile data published by the clean cargo group accounting for the average CO₂ impact of all container ships.

Truck transportation — Truck transportation from vendors to our distribution centers is computed by a ton-mile calculation using the vendor location, the distance of the shipment and the freight weight to arrive at total ton-miles of freight. The CO₂ impact per ton mile is derived from the average values published for "less than truckload" freight shipments consistent with our method in inter-company transfers.

Vendor shipments — Our product vendors also deliver some product directly to stores and this occurs via parcel post and "less than truckload" freight shipments. The CO₂ impacts have been computed based on total ton-miles of freight multiplied by the average impacts of parcels or average impact of less than truckload freight.

Good Outbound (distribution centers to stores)

Our method of calculation is to measure the total tons of cargo, the number of deliveries and the distance from a distribution center to each store. We use these factors to compute total freight ton-miles. To calculate CO₂ impact, we use a national average for fuel mileage of truck fleets (seven miles/gallon) and truck hauling weight based on the density of our shipments. Because of the nature of products, our shipments are less dense than the shipping industry norm. We then apply a standard conversion from diesel fuel gallons to pounds of CO₂ (22.2 pounds/gallon), which gives us a CO₂ factor per freight ton-mile. Lastly, we multiply our total freight ton-miles by this factor to give a reasonable calculation of our CO₂ impact.

Intra-company Transfers

This category also includes moving goods between stores and shipments back to our distribution centers from stores. This category is dominated by "less-than-truckload" freight transportation and common carrier freight services. We use the same ton-mile methodology and CO₂ factors as above.