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Sustainability has become an important issue for warehouse management in the US. Reducing the environmental impact of operations is a big challenge that can be overcome by improving process efficiency. In many cases, this is achieved by implementing warehouse automation. Efficient, automated processes need less energy, emit fewer greenhouse gases, and can do more within compact facilities. However, by choosing an automation partner that also champions sustainability, warehouse operators can truly maximize these benefits.

Hans Jongebloed, Senior Postal and Parcel Expert at Prime Vision, a global leader in computer vision integration and robotics for logistics and e-commerce, looks at sustainability challenges facing US warehouses and how the company reduces environmental impact.

Sustainability considerations for warehouses

A good place to start the journey to a sustainable warehouse is the facility itself. Solar panels, modern insulation, and a renewable energy supplier can greatly reduce the carbon footprint of operations. Placement is another factor to consider. A giant warehouse in an area of great natural value is undesirable aesthetically and ecologically, but logistics also play a part. Locating a compact warehouse in an optimal area for local deliveries, with good road connections, away from nature hotspots, minimizes environmental damage and traffic pollution.

Sustainability also applies to people. Thankfully, the days of warehouse workers walking miles carrying heavy loads week after week are almost behind us. With robots and other material handling solutions, personnel are no longer subjected to this level of manual labor, ensuring a happier, healthier workforce that is more willing to stay on.

While these sustainability goals can be reached, a particular industry challenge illustrates how warehouses can further improve the efficiency of operational processes and reduce environmental impact.

The point of no return

We’ve all indulged in clothes shopping at some point, and many of us choose to do it online. However, while an outfit can be easily tried on at the store, e-commerce customers do that at home, presenting warehouses with a big sustainability problem: returns. Millions of them.

One US logistics company stated that the CO₂ cost of returning e-commerce purchases was similar to the output of 3 million cars.^[1^] While e-commerce returns have dropped slightly compared to 2020 and 2021, they still amounted to $ 203.22 billion in 2022 (18% of total online purchases). The decline is expected to continue, hitting 14.7% in 2026.^[2^] Despite this trend, returns will continue to be a challenge for e-commerce businesses in the US.

Returns are a big sustainability issue for e-commerce, as they constitute a high volume of products swimming against the stream of the normal shipping process. First, the item needs to travel back to a distribution center (often different from where it came from), generating transport emissions. Then, it is a long, cumbersome manual procedure to identify the product, check its condition, and sort it properly. This often requires large numbers of personnel, generating extra CO₂ from commuting. If an item can’t be recycled or resold, it ends up as landfill, producing unnecessary waste. Needless to say that in the era of unlimited free returns, all these processes can also create extra costs for sellers.

This is clearly an area for improvement. However, enhancing the efficiency of the process flow offers a solution not just for returns, but any warehouse operation.

Automation equals efficiency

Naturally, automation is one of the main answers to this efficiency challenge, and thankfully, increasing efficiency always has a positive impact on sustainability.

Using the returns example, being able to quickly check products with computer vision systems, transport goods to appropriate areas for resale or recycling with robots, plus spot trends and areas where processes can be improved with analytics software can greatly expedite operations. Furthermore, it requires fewer personnel to function. By harnessing renewable energy to power automated equipment, warehouse operators can also mitigate the impact of the electricity demand, delivering these efficiency benefits sustainably.

Automating warehouse processes in this manner allows fulfillment and returns to be conducted on a reduced timeframe, within a more compact site, all while minimizing emissions, energy consumption and, effectively, lowering the operating costs. This means that sustainability goals can be met at every level of operations. However, choosing the right solutions can also bring additional benefits.

Sustainable approach to automation

At its facility in Richmond, Virginia, Prime Vision is working not just to provide products that enable the efficient, sustainable running of warehouse operations but is also reducing the carbon cost of the solutions themselves.

Robots are a critical component of a modern automated warehouse but are complex pieces of equipment that are intensive to produce. Consequently, Prime Vision focuses on reducing the impact of maintaining robots. A repair-rather-than-replace approach helps improve sustainability, but when a robot is beyond repair, Prime Vision rescues as many parts as possible to be used as spare components. Good-quality parts are fitted to other robots or used for in-house research – effectively recycling the components. Inspections identify and separate sub-par components, so there is no risk of fitting the robots with inferior parts. Localized repair facilities further ensure that spares and maintenance personnel can reach customers without generating the excessive carbon emissions associated with long-distance travel.

Software is another area of focus. Maintenance can be carried out remotely, so nobody needs to drive to site to carry out updates. Prime Vision also continually optimizes its software to run more efficiently, which reduces the number of servers required. Expanding on hardware and helping customers to collate facility computing power in an optimal, well-monitored space can save additional energy during installation and operation. Prime Vision applies new IT developments too, like hyper-converged infrastructure. Such cloud-style solutions with high scalability

and efficiency can eliminate the need for large quantities of servers on-site, allowing customers to downsize infrastructure while adding the required flexibility.

Choosing the right partner

Ultimately, to save the planet, the whole supply chain must work together to achieve the most sustainable logistics operations. This includes cooperation between warehouses and the companies that supply automation solutions to them. While the increased process efficiency enabled by robots, computer vision, and analytics software can greatly reduce the carbon footprint of warehouse operations – there is the provider to consider too.

Prime Vision is dedicated to reducing the environmental impact of its products and operations. A dedicated sustainability team continually assesses carbon footprint, identifying focus areas and actively lowering the company’s emissions. Along with its solutions and local presence, this ensures that while Prime Vision contributes to improving the sustainability of US warehouse operations, like its customers, it is also working on reducing the impact of the overall supply chain.

To insource or outsource your warehouse: That is the question.

Companies face many considerations when it comes to deciding whether to own or lease a warehouse filled with their own employees or hire a third party with warehousing expertise and their own workers.

Exploration of the latter has often caused the phone to ring—or the computer inbox to fill—for Todd Alloway, vice president, Contract Logistics at ODW Logistics. Since 1971—and including the 16 years Alloway has been with the company—the Columbus, Ohio, concern has been providing warehousing, distribution and transportation solutions for hundreds of brands.

Of course, ODW will take all the new business it can get, but Alloway concedes in a phone interview that outsourcing usually makes the least sense to a company that has “a team of logistics people inside the business.”

“They might have a vice president of supply chain who has 10 people under that person and a lot of other staff that are part of the business,” he says. “They may understand more about what they are doing” than a third party could coming in cold.

Alloway says he and his team must understand that before making a pitch to outsource to such a company, admitting it can get delicate if you are talking with someone who may lose his or her job or has buddies in positions that could disappear with outsourcing. “We have to walk that fine line,” he says.

It also might make sense to keep things in house if a company’s services or products are complex or highly specialized, something that can come up with those who are big in the manufacturing world, according to Alloway.

Typically, before partnering with a potential client, Alloway will meet with their leadership “face to face to ensure they are a good fit.” During that initial interview, he will gather information about the business. “I can’t go on and say why ODW will be better until I truly understand your business,” he says. “Upfront research is the first thing we have to do.”

“I tell folks that all the time that you can’t just hand me a price sheet and have me give you a price. There is no blanket pricing or one size fits all for businesses. We find out a lot of times that they don’t even know what they need. We have to find out what is valuable on both ends, we’ve got to find out what’s important.”

In today’s ever-changing modern warehousing, outsourcing may be what’s important. It allows a company to leverage someone else’s expertise in transportation, warehousing, distribution, setting up supply chains and maintaining compliance standards, so the original client can focus again on its core competency.

“A lot of our customers started out doing it themselves,” Alloway notes, but as those companies grew, so did their capital investments in staffing, equipping and maintaining warehouses. Suddenly confronted with the need to consolidate operations and/or become technologically viable, many such companies turn to third-party experts like ODW Logistics.

Another challenge with keeping a modern warehouse in-house is staffing, according to Alloway, who cites as an example his company’s Columbus base, where the unemployment rate currently hovers around 3 percent. Companies with warehouses, he says, must develop strategies when it comes to seeking, training and retaining skilled workers among an ever more competitive labor pool. Faced with the time, effort and cost of staying in the hiring game, many conclude it would be better to farm all that out so they can, again, concentrate on their company’s service or product.

When it comes to logistics, companies that ship to big box retailers also have to know the differing compliance, ordering and fulfillment processes of, say, Walmart, Target and Kohl’s. Concerns like ODW Logistics already thrive in that atmosphere because of experience already gleaned on behalf of existing customers, Alloway points out.

As a for instance, ODW’s Director of Marketing John Meier mentions a health and beauty customer that knew going in that the logistics company already worked with others in the same industry.

“One key differentiator” when it came to snagging that account “was our expertise with Ulta, Sephora, different salons and big box retailers,” Alloway recalls. “Word of mouth is still very big in the industry.”

Wanting to know whether ODW has experience in a potential customer’s industry is often the first question Alloway gets. Another, obviously, is price, “especially from someone new to the market that has done it themselves the entire time,” he says. “They want the new technology and whatever the latest and greatest inventory management system is, but they don’t understand the cost that gets that. A lot of time it is education on our part” that is imparted to the potential client.

Likewise, a company like Alloway’s can figure out the overall savings that will ultimately come from outsourcing, but the one thing he and his colleagues will not do is quote a price until they have completed research of the potential client and its industry.

Today’s “I want it now” shipping culture has challenged companies like ODW Logistics, concedes Alloway, who adds that he approaches a delivery schedule less on speed than on the best optimization of his trucks. “Next day and two day are still important,” he says, “but in a direct consumer market it’s more important how you handle returns.”

After pausing to think more about today’s expected speedy deliveries, he adds, “We have had to put in a valiant effort that last few years.”

However, Alloway also offers that with a new client, landing the account does not always come down to speed, price or even experience. He brings up Handgards, a provider of high quality food safety, food protection, protective wear and food service products. The El Paso, Texas-based company managed its distribution network for half a century before partnering with ODW Logistics a decade ago.

“One of the most important attributes they sought was a cultural fit,” says Alloway. “They are a family-oriented business and when we first went to visit them we quickly understood that, and we were able to help them see how ODW has the business values that would match theirs.”

You read that right: Choosing whether to stay in house or go with a third party can come down to whether you get your new partner and are convinced your new partner gets you. What was most important to Handgards was someone, as Alloway put it, “with a similar feel.” ODW now handles the food safety company’s logistics and warehouse support in a 300,000-square-foot facility.

“The people that I have worked with in the ODW organization have been excellent partners to our business and work diligently on our behalf,” said an executive with Handgards.

“Like with most companies outsourcing for the first time, there can be a fear of change, a fear of how a new one is going to handle a product,” Alloway says. “‘Will they do it like we do? Will they talk with customers like we do?’ We went and visited them, made some research and it did not come down to price. It came down to did they like us and did they think we would be a good business fit together.

“… Sometimes we are not the best fit, somebody else is or they should keep doing it themselves. You just do not know that until you do the research.”

Efficient Warehouses Fit Sustainable Operations

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