Channel has plenty of scope to reduce emissions
The recent Corporate Citizenship Report from TD Synnex, its second, makes for interesting reading.
CEO Patrick Zammit was full of praise for a “year of and corporate citizenship progress for TD Synnex amid rapid technological change”.
The distributor revealed it had reduced its Scope 1 (direct) & 2 (indirect) emissions by around 30% in 2023, mainly driven by moving some of its facilities to renewable energy sources. It has set a target of a 42% reduction in those emissions by 2030. Longer term, the distributor plans to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions across the value chain by 2045.
TD Synnex identified “two towers of specialisation” where it believes it is uniquely positioned to advance sustainability change: the circular economy and transportation & logistics.
On the latter, it noted that freight transportation is an essential issue to address if “we want to make meaningful climate progress”. One of the ways the distributor is trying to reduce emissions is by consolidating shipments, increasing the load factor of vehicles while reducing per parcel emissions.
“We are engaging and collaborating with our logistics providers to explore more sustainable methods of distribution such as load and modal optimisation,” the report noted.
Shared load
On the subject of the circular economy, it highlighted the issue of global electronic waste which is being produced in record volumes with less than a fifth properly collected and recycled. To help strengthen the circular economy, TD Synnex partnered with a number of top technology brands to expand renew, refurbishment and trade-in services and diverted more mobile devices from landfills across Europe.
Corporate vice president, global communications and corporate citizenship Jill Kermes made an interesting point when she said: “Thanks to our vantage point at the heart of the IT channel ecosystem, we are uniquely well-positioned to help vendors, partners and end users accelerate their adoption of sustainable technology solutions and business practices. And we have a shared duty – along with our ecosystem partners – to do so.”
It seems that, yet again, the distributor’s position as the middle man (or woman) between vendors and partners is proving a potentially vital place to be to deliver on climate reduction measures. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy, even if it is a “shared duty”.
The report’s focus on Scope 1 & 2 emissions is partly due to the fact that those are the easier categories of emissions to tackle because companies have more control over them. But one of the big areas for channel partners, given their role in the supply chain, is the carbon costs associated with being part of that chain: Scope 3 emissions. They are far harder to control.
As then Westcoast managing director Alex Tatham pointed out in 2022, Scope 3 emissions are “the toughest for the channel to cope with”. He argued, with some justification, that the impact of a distributor on the overall carbon emissions of a product was “tiny”. But it was still difficult to see what could be done to try and control or contain those emissions.
Tatham proposed a ‘carbon count’ label by SKU giving information on how much carbon a product had taken and its environmental impact, arguing it would “help the whole channel”.
Needless to say, that hasn’t been adopted so far.
As TD Synnex admits in a section of the report entitled ‘Addressing Scope 3 Emissions’, the majority of its carbon footprint “is comprised of emissions from our value chain and also transportation-related activities”, resulting primarily from the production and use of the goods and services it distributes, and through the transportation and use of products it brings to market.
“Because these emissions occur from sources beyond our direct control, they’re more difficult to calculate and reduce,” the report admits. It’s trying to address them by “promoting circular economy principles, green transportation, sustainable marketing, events and products, and best practice sharing, tools and education for our partners”.
It does put what Kermes had to say in a whole new light, though. While it’s true that the vantage point for distributors at the heart of the IT channel ecosystem means they are uniquely well-positioned to help vendors, partners and end users accelerate the adoption of sustainable technology solutions, it also means they are in a particularly vulnerable position because they are reliant on other sources to take action to reduce Scope 3 emissions and it’s completely outside their control.
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