On Tuesday’s Net-Zero Carbon segment, FreightWaves TV’s Kaylee Nix and Tyler Cole speak with Trax President Josh Bouk about the importance of data management in pursuit of environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals.
Efforts toward advanced sustainability begin with purposeful data collection, according to Bouk.
“It all comes down to data and your access to actuals and the true cost of that freight,” Bouk said. “Trax for 30 years has been a freight auditor in this space, and over the last five years, we’ve invested over $30 million to build the first global transportation spend management platform that helps all enterprises be able to manage centrally all of their transportation, all modes, all regions, all the costs in one place.”
Cole, host of FreightWaves’ Net-Zero Carbon, stressed the importance of ESG data, saying “without it, you’re lost.”
“These are things that we use to calculate good carbon emission data too,” Bouk said. “Being able to harvest the actuals data coming out of China and Amsterdam and Charleston [South Carolina] and collecting all that in one place and using those same data points to then be able to calculate carbon emissions accurately, by load, by vehicle type, by plane is what we’re doing in our new carbon emissions manager product.”
Added Cole: “You can’t be precise or accurate unless you know where you’re heading, and that’s where data plays a big role.”
According to Bouk, publicly traded companies will be required to report their Scope 3 emissions starting in 2025.
“Once they measure, now they can apply that data to offer those results to their procurement people to help negotiate contracts with their suppliers,” Bouk said.
Said Cole: “You’ve got a lot of [incumbents] in the industry that are trying to take the data they currently have and own and figure out how to repurpose it and reuse it to simultaneously achieve ESG reporting goals.”
While collecting and reporting that data accurately may seem to be a large task for some enterprises, Bouk assures that the results will be well worth the effort.
“In the interim, being able to have just a single consistent method for calculating carbon across your modes and ]then] being able to find a good data source to allow you to make good assumptions,” he said. “I think that’s going to pass the SEC’s criteria. And at Trax, we’re just thrilled that we have the leading solution for that space right now in the market.”
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