Watch our video below:

For more information on our work with trucks, visit http://edf.org/greenfleet

To help fleets reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and harness cost savings, Environmental Defense Fund teamed up with past partner PHH Arval, a leading fleet management company, to identify and showcase a number of effective and replicable strategies to reduce emissions and costs from medium-duty trucks.

Highlights of this new whitepaper, available at http://edf.org/greenfleet, include:

• How Frito-Lay saved 10% on fuel by downsizing its urban grocery store delivery truck model from a 24-foot Class 6 straight truck to a 20-foot Class 5;
• How by reducing speeding and after hours use and deploying a telematics solution, LKQ decreased idling by 62% and saved 16 gallons of fuel per vehicle each month;
• How Staples modified the transmission control unit and installed speed governors to increased the fuel economy of its single-unit trucks by 12-16% and
• How PoolCorp improved fuel economy by 4% by making adjustments to the Engine Control Module (ECM) that limit speed and shorten engine idle intervals.

Recognizing that every fleet is different, the whitepaper showcases 14 strategies and includes options for every duty cycle to improve efficiency and cut emissions.

Look for opportunities to drive medium-duty trucks in your fleet onto the onramp of a lower-carbon future.

This content is cross-posted on Greenbiz.com

The article is wide-ranging; covering air, rail, long-haul trucks, and light-duty fleets. Among the points made are:

• “Only 22 Fortune 500 companies have begun blunting their supply chain’s impact on the environment”
• The amount of cargo shipped is “expected to triple in the next 20 years”
• Measuring ghg emissions is the “fundamental starting point” of “any serious entity”
• Recent volatility in the petroleum market  “is a lens into the future of oil and gas prices” and taking steps to reduce ghg emissions can lessen exposure to these fluctuations
• When reducing transportation emissions, “it is best to begin with the ‘low-hanging fruit’”
• Rail transport is four times more efficient per ton than motor and 600 times more efficient than air transport

The authors also highlight many companies that have started to take action. These include:

• Abbott Laboratories, who we assisted in their move to more efficient vehicles
• Dell, who “increased first-time deliveries to customers by 80%”
• Tyson Food, who switched to aluminum wheels for its tractors
• HP, Dell, Limited Brands and Estee Lauder, who are “converting air shipments to ground or ocean transport” as a way to reduce emissions.

‘Greening” Transportation in the Supply Chain is a great read and very interesting piece of research.

On February 4, the landmark program officially opened, and boy, were fleets ready. In the first 12 hours, about 25 percent of the program’s $20 million in vouchers had been requested.

All fleets with trucks operating in California are eligible for up to 100 vouchers each, on a first-come, first-served basis. With nearly $15 million still up for grabs, so it’s not too late to claim your share.

The program, launched last week by the California Air Resources Board and administered by CALSTART, will provide $20 million in funding assistance for fleets to replace old diesel trucks with newer, cleaner hybrid trucks.  Depending on the vehicle weight and model, the voucher amounts range from $10,000 to $45,000, including a $5,000 bonus for each participating fleet’s first purchase. Details about participating in the program, approved dealers and eligible vehicles are available on the program website at http://www.californiahvip.org/

What sets the Hybrid Voucher Incentive Program (HVIP) apart from other programs is that this is the nation’s first voucher program, meaning that fleets receive the benefit at the point of sale. There are no applications to fill out or rebates to wait for; dealers throughout California have been trained and approved to fill out the necessary paperwork, request vouchers and take the savings off the sticker price of your new hybrid truck. Environmental Defense Fund applauds CARB for taking the needs of vehicle purchasers into account and hope HVIP’s success can be a model for other states.

In addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and soot on California’s highways, the 800 hybrids expected to be sold through the program will boost our economy. In 2009, researchers at Duke University completed a study on the hybrid truck value chain. They found that the hybrid truck industry employs workers in at least 143 sites across the United States, in some of the cities hardest hit by the recession. HVIP will increase the total number of hybrid trucks on the road by about 50%. Now that’s what I call job creation!

For more information on hybrid trucks and other opportunities to reduce emissions from corporate vehicles, visit the Green Fleet section of EDF’s website.  There you can find a guide to incentive programs to support the purchase of hybrid trucks and track the makes and models of hybrid trucks currently available to fleets.

While the sour economic condition was definitely a factor in the size of this decrease, the numbers likely also reflect – and to a significant degree – the fact that over the recent years corporate fleets have made strides to lower per vehicle emissions.

A likely leading non-economic factor in reducing emissions is the adoption of vehicle “right-sizing” practices. Abbott Labs, Infinity Insurance and Owens Corning were among the first companies to demonstrate the value of moving from moving to more efficiency vehicles on a wide-scale. The record gas prices of 2008 gave the shift real momentum. The 2009 emissions data reflects the first full year of operations by the more-efficient vehicles that were cycled into fleets in the mid-2008 buy cycle.

Read more about our work with these companies and partner PHH Arval.

The expansion of other emission reduction tactics is also likely reflected in these numbers. Over the past two years, there has been a proliferation of efforts that work with drivers to adopt fuel-smart driving practices. Here at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), we noted the many companies entering this space in our 2009 Innovations Review and also create a suite of materials for fleets to use.

Increased use of efforts to improve routing and reduce idling likely also has contributed to the emissions decline. Leading fleets, including Carrier and Poland Spring, have leveraged telematics software to improve operational efficiency.

Read more in these case studies about Carrier [PDF] and Poland Spring [PDF].

I am optimistic that the trend in fleet emission reductions will continue as the economy recovers of the coming years.

From measuring emissions, right-sizing vehicles, improving routing, reducing idling and improving driving habitats, corporate fleets are broadly adopting strategies to reduce their emissions.

We teamed up with stresslimitdesign to create an engaging minute-long tilt shift video about the savings potential if all US corporate fleets took some simple steps to improve efficiency.

For those of you not yet in the know, fleet efficiency is about reducing fuel consumption by taking incremental actions, including choosing better routes, avoiding idling and moving to higher MPG vehicles. These actions add up to fuel savings and emission reductions, especially when multiplied by the millions of vehicles in U.S. corporate fleets.

Looking for more information about how to do it?  Check out these tools:

• Five-Step Green Fleet Framework
• Calculate your fleet emissions
• Fuel-smart driver training module

What opportunities are there on the passenger vehicle side?

In this month’s Wired magazine, hypermiler Darin Cosgrove demonstrates a 15 percent improvement in MPG from his homemade vehicle boat tail. His prototype is not the prettiest thing ever, as Darin readily admits (you can see a photo of it here). But he claims the MPG savings are real, which got me thinking. This would be a perfect fit for a small fleet that wanted to make a statement and get noticed.

Let’s assume that we have a fleet of 100 vehicles. The average miles traveled per vehicle is 22,000 with a 22 MPG – fairly typical numbers—and the vehicles only travel half of their miles at high enough speeds to make the 15% improvement. That fleet could save $19,000 a year.

What’s the cost? Darin’s inputs are duct tape, cardboard, an aluminum frame and his time. Any version for professional use would need to be made of sturdier materials, but it might still be cheap enough for a year or less payback.

The benefits are three fold: cost savings over the lifetime use of the product, avoided greenhouse gas emissions, and probably a lot of free media exposure.

The vehicles would be so unique that they’d be certainly noticed, which is a goal of many fleets (think Geek Squad). Plus, the fleet would be demonstrating for all to see another way to reduce emissions. It seems like a good deal to me for an intrepid fleet willing to take a chance. Any takers?

For more ideas on how to lower costs and emissions from your fleet, visit edf.org/greenfleet.

Shortly after I became manager of Poland Spring’s truck fleet in 2007, we transitioned our fleet of 36 tractor-trailers and 75 tanker trailers from conventional diesel fuel to B5, a non-food grade biodiesel.  The switch reflected Poland Spring’s on-going commitment to lightening our environmental footprint and successfully reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by about 1.8 million pounds annually.  An added benefit was a decrease in fuel costs by about nine cents per gallon, a savings that became increasingly significant as fuel prices climbed to around $5 per gallon in 2008.

Since then, we have continued to seek new ways to reduce our carbon footprint and improve the fuel economy of our truck fleet, even as fuel prices stabilized. In 2008, we challenged our drivers to cut back the amount of time their trucks sat idling. The response was amazing. Our drivers lowered idling rates by 70%, from 1,400 hours in February 2007 to just 380 hours in February 2009. Even with that accomplishment, we continue to find ways to further reduce idling.  Year-to-date our fleet has only a 3.6% idle time rate, surpassing our goal of 5% in 2009. Cutting idling time has reduced our fleet’s fuel consumption by 8,000 gallons and greenhouse gas emissions by about 77 tons per year.

Idling reduction is only one of the ways Poland Spring has worked to curb greenhouse gas emissions.  Our drivers reduced their top highway speeds by two miles per hour, from 66 mph to 64 mph, and we are in the process of mapping optimum routes and mileage to increase the efficiency of our transport team.   The combination of these efforts could mean an additional 1.95 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions spared and almost $50,000 in savings to the company this year. Read more in this case study on how Poland Spring has reduced its fleet emissions [PDF].

Decreasing our fleet’s emissions is a win-win. Not only does it make good business sense because we’re reducing our fuel consumption and lowering our costs, it also makes good environmental sense. These efforts, along with our other environmental initiatives, would not be possible without the commitment of our nearly 800 full-time and seasonal Maine employees.  We’re all working to make the state we have proudly called home for over 160 years a better place to live and work.

For more tips and best practices to improve vehicle use, visit EDF’s Fuel-Smart Driving Practices Module.

Together with PHH, we worked with Abbott to establish a greenhouse gas emissions baseline and a plan for incorporating more efficient vehicles into the company’s fleet. For its first buy-cycle under the program, Abbott proceeded with a fair amount of caution; mainly offering incentives such as satellite radios and sunroofs to move its drivers to more efficient vehicles.  Yet, the company was able to noticeably reduce fuel cost and emissions and, perhaps most importantly, demonstrate a model that other fleets could follow.

Abbott continued to build upon its auspicious start. The company took each buy cycle as an opportunity to make adjustments to its vehicle offerings, including incorporating more efficient vehicles (including some hybrid options for the first time), restricting less-efficient four-wheel drive vehicles to Snowbelt states and recognizing drivers for greener choices.  In 2008, the company announced its intention to make their U.S. fleet "carbon neutral." Abbott continued to push the envelope and be a model for other fleets when it increased personal use premiums on less fuel-efficient vehicles, resulting in additional shifts away from SUVs and minivans to sedans.

The results of Abbott’s efforts through the PHH GreenFleet program speak for themselves:

• 13% reduction in SUV and minivan selections over two years
• 8% of fleet is now fuel-efficient hybrid models (up from just a handful of hybrid vehicles before 2006)
• 16% improvement in overall fleet vehicle fuel efficiency since 2006
• 600,000+ gallons of gasoline reduced per year

The Fleet Financials article also covers Abbott’s success at building a diverse team to lead its fleet greening effort.

Check out these additional resources for greening your company’s fleet and let us know how you’re using them.

Novo Nordisk, Poland Springs and Carrier are demonstrating that driving less, selecting more efficient vehicles, and choosing lower-carbon fuel sources are bedrock principles of the greenhouse gas management approach EDF has long advocated for corporate fleets to utilize.

Novo Nordisk, a leading healthcare company with a fleet of 2,500 cars in the U. S., was able to reduce its fleet greenhouse gas emissions in the first six months of 2009 by 21% compared to the same period in 2007. Right-sizing vehicles were responsible for the majority of the emission reductions. Additionally, Novo Nordisk was among the first major fleets to train their drivers on fuel-smart driving practices, such as avoiding aggressive driving and minimizing idling. This effort alone helped Novo Novdisk increase the fuel efficiency of its existing vehicle stock by nearly 3%. There fleet wide efforts help them avoid over 7,000 metric tons of emissions and $2.3 million in fuel purchases – a clear win-win.

Poland Springs operates a much smaller fleet in terms of number of vehicles than Novo Nordisk, even though each vehicle is much, much larger. The Maine-based company has 36 tractor-trailers and 75 tanker trailers. Right-sizing opportunities for these vehicles are limited. For them, improving the use of the vehicles offers the greatest near-term emission reductions. By using onboard computers, Poland Springs slashed truck idling by 70% and reduced the top speed of its vehicles. These efforts and the roll-out of waste-based B5 help the company reduce emission nearly 80 metric tons and $20,000 in costs.

Carrier Corporation, which is part of UTC, reduced fleet emissions by leveraging data from onboard computers, vehicle right-sizing and reducing vehicle weight. The company operates a fleet of over 3,000 vehicles in North America, including service trucks and sedans driven by sales staff. Carrier focused on the service vehicles first since they are the source of the largest percentage of emissions. To start, Carrier moved technicians whose job required less equipment from the Ford E-350, which was previously standard equipment; to the smaller and more efficient Ford F-150 and Ford Ranger. They then rolled out an onboard data system to all of its service vehicles. Carrier was able to leverage the data it collected to dramatically reduce idling and excessive speeding, while also improving routing. From its efforts Carrier has reduced its fleet emissions by 30% and is saving $1 million each year in fuel costs.

These three companies are in very different industries and operate distinctly different fleets. Yet, they were all able to reduce emissions and costs with tools available to them today. We encourage all companies to follow the lead of these three and search out the fuel-saving solutions that make sense for them today in order to keep finding opportunities to make even greater reductions in the future.

Find out more about our Green Fleet Case Studies.