By Derek Hart, sales director at Pace Technology UK

Sustainability has become very good at producing targets, reports, dashboards and promises. What it isn’t always as good at doing is changing the decisions made at 8am on a Monday morning, when a refrigerated vehicle leaves the depot, a driver gets held up on a route or a refrigeration unit appears to be working harder or for longer than expected.

That’s where I think businesses should be looking much harder at connected technology. If a company can use the data it already collects to stop wasting energy, mileage, vehicle capacity or product, there’s a commercial reason to do it as well as an environmental one.

Too much of the sustainability conversation still happens at reporting level. Businesses measure emissions, set reduction targets and produce increasingly detailed accounts of their environmental performance; all of that has its place, but measuring waste doesn’t remove it.

The harder question is what happens after the number appears on the spreadsheet. If the answer isn’t a change to the way vehicles are operated, goods are transported or energy is consumed, then we’re measuring the problem rather than solving it.

Take refrigeration. Nobody disputes that temperature-controlled transport needs refrigeration, particularly when the goods being moved are medicines, healthcare products or other sensitive stock.

What deserves more scrutiny is whether refrigeration is operating more than the conditions genuinely require, and whether operators actually have enough information to identify it.

That matters because energy waste rarely announces itself as a major event. It can come from small inefficiencies repeated across hundreds or thousands of journeys, vehicles spending longer than expected at stops, equipment operating when it isn’t needed or refrigeration systems working harder because something isn’t performing correctly.

One vehicle might only waste a modest amount of energy; across a large fleet, the cost becomes much harder to ignore. The environmental saving follows the commercial saving because both are being driven by the same underlying waste.

Product waste is even harder to justify. When a temperature-sensitive product ultimately has to be discarded following an excursion that could potentially have been prevented, the business loses the value of the stock, but that’s only part of the cost.

The energy and materials used to manufacture it, package it, store it and transport it have also been wasted; replacing it may then require another production cycle and another journey.

If technology can identify a temperature problem while goods are still in transit, operators have an opportunity to intervene before an operational issue becomes a product loss.

The same thinking applies to vehicle utilisation. A vehicle travelling empty, sitting unused for long periods or being sent out on a journey that could have been combined with another delivery represents wasted capacity.

Every unnecessary mile carries a cost, whether the vehicle is powered by diesel, electricity or something else; there’s still driver time, tyre wear, servicing, depreciation and vehicle availability to consider.

Reducing a journey can therefore remove several costs at once. Where better planning allows the existing fleet to complete more work without adding vehicles, the business may also be able to delay capital expenditure and make better use of assets it already owns.

This is why I don’t think sustainability should sit in a separate part of the business.

The people responsible for environmental reporting shouldn’t be the only ones thinking about energy, waste and emissions; fleet managers, transport planners, engineers and operations teams make decisions every day that directly affect all three.

Technology, of course, isn’t going to make an inefficient operation efficient by itself. There’s no shortage of businesses collecting vast amounts of telematics data without making meaningful changes to how their fleets operate.

The value comes when someone looks at the information, asks why a particular pattern exists, makes a decision and then checks whether the result improved. Without that final step, connected technology risks becoming another reporting system rather than a tool for changing the operation.

There will always be a place for sustainability targets, carbon reporting and formal environmental commitments. But businesses shouldn’t confuse measuring their environmental impact with managing it.

The real opportunity is much more practical: use connected data to find where resources are being wasted, change the operation that is causing the waste and measure the result.

For fleet and cold chain operators, the case for connected technology shouldn’t therefore start with an environmental report.

It should start with a question about the operation: where are we wasting money, energy, capacity or product that we could reasonably prevent from being wasted?

Once that question is being asked properly, the environmental benefits tend to follow.