Driving Down Emissions with Fleet Sustainability Index

With so many trucking companies and vehicles on North American roads, tracking CO2 emissions can be a complicated and daunting process. In cooperation with the University of Tennessee Research Foundation (UTRF), Alex Scott, Gerald T. Niedert Professor, developed a solution: the Fleet Sustainability Index. Below, Scott discusses his research and how it’s impacting the field of logistics.

What are Scope 3 emissions, and why do companies need a way to measure them accurately?
Scope 3 emissions include upstream and downstream activities in a supply chain, such as transportation. In many cases, Scope 2 (purchased energy consumption) and Scope 3 make up the vast majority of total emissions in manufacturing and distributing a product. It’s important to be able to measure Scope 3 because government regulations from the European Union, the State of California, and others are starting to require reporting. Also, many companies are making public pledges of sustainability goals. If they say they’re going to be Net Zero, they have to prove it.

What’s the solution you’ve developed for tracking emissions, and how does it work?
Trucking is one of the largest sources of CO2 emissions. Drawing on 20 years of experience in the transportation field, I’ve developed a database of sources and an online platform, the Fleet Sustainability Index, to give companies insight into hundreds of thousands of trucking companies on the roads and their CO2 emissions based on the types of trucks in their fleets. Companies can log in, search for carriers, and instantly see data points such as total emissions, emissions ranking, number of trucks used, and specific makes and models. They can then export that data into a spreadsheet and analyze it.

What impact do you hope your solution will have on the field of transportation and logistics?
When shippers are evaluating carriers, they typically select one based on price, service, and safety. Our goal is to get people to consider sustainability, and the Fleet Sustainability Index makes it much easier to do that. When shippers select cleaner carriers, they incentivize carriers to select cleaner trucks. It’s a market-based solution.

What research have you published on this topic?
I have a paper, published in 2023 in the Journal of Operations Management, evaluating how visibility into carrier emissions can affect carrier behavior. Using the EPA SmartWay program as evidence, the paper shows that visibility into the emissions of a carrier can influence the carrier’s behavior. That research influenced my strategy for developing the Fleet Sustainability Index.

“When shippers select cleaner carriers, they incentivize carriers to select cleaner trucks.”
Alex Scott