While it may be cost-effective to have skids of Asian sauces shipped from a Vancouver depot to your store in rural Quebec, it doesn’t make economic – or environmental – sense to send all those empty pallets and containers back and forth across the country.
Which is why the CPC developed Electronic Container Transfer (ECT), an online system for reducing the travel time for empty shipping materials.
The automated system notifies CPC members of opportunities to return containers to nearby members (instead of their far-flung origins), who in turn exchange their pallets with other affiliates, and so on in a series of shorter shipping loops.
“Not only does ECT help reduce transportation costs, it also reduces road traffic, fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions,” said Belinda Junkin, president and CEO of the CPC. Other benefits include minimizing damage to pallets and the potential for companies to earn carbon credits.
ECT went live on June 25th. For more information, visit cpcpallet.com.
As many as 30 million shipping pallets travel across Canada each year, according to the Canadian Pallet Council (CPC).
And each one of those pallets, along with countless shipping containers, eventually needs to be returned to its owner.
