inbound
Do you know a Rainmaker?
Get a load of these …
PHOTO COURTESY OF FEDEX
Our recent item on a pair of hippos that traveled by forklift at the Philadelphia Zoo seems to have prompted a
flood of similar announcements. We’ve since heard a
number of other stories about out-of-the-ordinary cargoes, including the following:
▪ When the North Carolina Zoo needed to bring a
13,000-pound elephant in for eye surgery, R&M Materials
Handling Inc. of Springfield, Ohio, helped to pick up that
considerable load. R&M supplied a Loadmate chain hoist
as part of a harness used to lift C’sar, a 37-year-old male
elephant, in preparation for the procedure.
▪ In early December, the “FedEx Panda Express,” a specially chartered Boeing 777F, carried giant pandas Tian Tian
and Yang Guang from Chengdu’s Bifengxia Panda Base to
Edinburgh, Scotland. The pandas traveled in custom-built
enclosures provided by FedEx and were driven in a specially decaled FedEx Express vehicle to the Edinburgh Zoo.
▪ At about the same time, a FedEx Express MD11 aircraft was transporting a very different type of bear. The
carrier delivered three 11-month-old grizzly bears from
Alaska to their new home at the Detroit Zoo. The brothers, nicknamed Thor, Mike, and Boo, were rescued in
October by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game
after their mother was killed by an alleged poacher.
▪ Penske Truck Rental donated transportation from
Minneapolis to Norcross, Ga., for a shipment of 7,000
pounds of tiny bars of soap collected from hotels. The soaps
will be reprocessed into new bars for delivery by the Global
Soap Project to developing countries, where they will help
to improve sanitation and reduce disease transmission.
▪ And back in October, a Crown Equipment C- 5 Series
pneumatic-tire forklift safely transported the winning
1,370-pound pumpkin during the annual Pumpkinfest in
New Bremen, Ohio, where the truck maker is headquartered. All together, Crown forklifts moved 16 pumpkins,
each weighing more than 1,000 pounds. ;
Know someone who is making a difference in the
world of logistics? Then consider nominating him or
her as one of DC VELOCITY’S “Rainmakers”—
professionals from all facets of the business whose achievements set them apart from the crowd. In the past,
our Rainmakers have included practitioners, consultants, academics, vendors, professional association directors, and even military commanders.
To find these Rainmakers, the DC VELOCITY
editorial team works in collaboration with members of the
magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board. The process
begins in January, when the nominating committee
starts developing a list of candidates, and concludes
in April with a vote to determine which nominees
will be invited to become Rainmakers. The 2012
Rainmakers will be unveiled in our July issue.
If you’d like to nominate someone for our 2012
Rainmakers profiles, please send an e-mail outlining
your nominee’s accomplishments by Feb. 15 to
Editorial Director Peter Bradley at peter@dcvelocity.com. ;
How green is your
parcel carrier?
Consumers typically choose parcel carriers based on
price and transit time. Climate Counts, a non-profit
group devoted to fighting climate change, wants
them to add carriers’ environmental records to the
equation. To that end, the group has developed a
shopping guide to help consumers “support compa-
nies that take climate change seriously and avoid
those that don’t.”
Climate Counts’ shopping guide ranks 144 large
companies in 17 sectors on a scale of 0 to 100 (the
higher the score, the greener the company). Its “con-
sumer shipping” scorecard includes the four largest
parcel carriers: UPS (with a score of 80), DHL and its
parent Deutsche Post World Net ( 78), the U.S. Postal
Service ( 69), and FedEx ( 65). Those results, the group
says, indicate that the parcel shipping industry “has
begun to address its climate impact, but has far to go.”
The non-profit uses 22 criteria to determine
whether companies have measured their climate
footprint, reduced their impact on global warming,
supported progressive climate legislation, and pub-
licly disclosed their climate-related actions. ;
