To accomplish this, Mathers works closely with shippers, carriers, third-party logistics service providers, and
others to design greenhouse gas management programs
for fleets, best practices and tools for tracking and reducing emissions, and training materials for fuel-smart driving. Many of those best practices have been assembled in
the organization’s Green Freight Handbook, which was
published last year.
More recently, Mathers and EDF, along with a consortium of 12 food and apparel companies, have been
working to convince the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation
to require America’s heavy-duty truck fleets to cut their
fuel consumption and carbon emissions by 40 percent.
DCV Editor at Large Susan
Lacefield spoke with Mathers about
EDF’s efforts and about how supply
chain managers can play a role in
helping protect the environment.
QHow you did become an envi- ronmentalist, and why do you
focus on logistics and supply chain
management in particular?
AI think I have always been someone who has been mission-driven and interested in being
part of a broader effort. That’s what
led me to join the U.S. Navy out of
high school. After leaving the service
and getting ready to go to college, I
knew I wanted to do something else
that was mission-driven. Working
on environmental issues and climate
change really spoke to me. Climate change has a huge
impact on every aspect of our society today and will continue to have an impact on future generations.
Freight logistics accounts for about 6 percent of global
pollution. Logistics, then, is a natural area to be part of
the solution, to really be a leader. And in many cases,
there’s so much alignment between practices that [pro-duce] cost savings and those that lead to environmental
improvements.
QThe military seems like an unusual proving ground for an environmentalist. Are you applying any of the
skills you learned while in the military to your work at
EDF?
AOne of the critical life skills I learned in the Navy was the ability to break a challenge into smaller tasks.
When you think about how to solve the problem of climate change, you start by looking at all the pieces that
add up to cause it. [For example,] the impact of carbon
dioxide emissions is a critical, big-effort issue. It’s easy to
be overwhelmed by it. It’s so big, it can seem impossible
to solve, but there are actually thousands of solutions,
and all are necessary.
QIs it possible to be both pro-business and an environmentalist?
AAbsolutely. Why do I believe that? Because I see it every day—for example, when we are working
with Pepsi-Cola to urge the EPA
and Department of Transportation
to put forth strong fuel-efficien-cy standards, or when Google and
Amazon came out in court in support of clean power plants and called
the transition to a “clean-energy
economy” critical to their growth
as companies. Wal-Mart is working
every day to get toxic chemicals out
of the products in its stores and
out of the agricultural supply chain.
There are thousands of examples of
companies embracing sustainability.
QAt some point, business needs are going to come into conflict
with what’s best for the environment. Do you have any advice for
how to navigate those tradeoffs?
AWhen a company is thinking about how it can improve its environmental footprint, there are a
couple of key areas that it needs to focus on. First, it
needs to look at what it can do today to improve its
operations that also makes business sense, whether it be
increasing load capacity when applicable or using intermodal transportation when possible. There are lots of
opportunities to do this, and you should be spending 80
percent of your time on this near-term focus.
Then, the company needs to be asking, “How can we
help build a future and shape it in a way that is good
from an environmental perspective and is going to be
good from an economic perspective?” Twenty percent of
your time should be spent on this long-term focus. For
