Making sustainability personal

Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility (CSR) programs are not led but merely guided by achieving your EcoVadis label or ISO14001 audit. It is not something that can live within your organization by sending over an SLA or asking your clients to offset your emissions. Manager of European Services, Lennert De Jong, elaborates.

(this story appeared in The Portal Magazine)

CSR has to be adopted within the organization by each layer. Gosselin, being an asset-based mover with trucks across Europe, has quite a large scope of direct carbon footprint. The emissions are inherent to the business being in logistics. The effort to improve those by using new technologies has to come from within the organization, steered by a high-level vision embedded into the mission.

Small efforts

The awareness and curiosity to look for new alternatives can start small with notes about lights, recycling, all the way to having a very successful yearly Gosselin green week and a River Clean-up (851 kg in total collected by our offices) or even ‘leasing’ a bicycle through Gosselin. A recently launched ‘idea box’ allowed us to distill 57 ideas about saving energy! So, luckily, there is still much room for improvement.

Strategically located

Gosselin uses waterways whenever possible to organize transport from as far as Germany and Switzerland for our means, using the position of our HQ near the water to organize direct transit to one of Europe’s major ports by barge. We save carbon emissions and make a social impact by saving many kilometers of traffic each year for the already congested highways around Antwerp.

Swap body 

Although the above helps, it doesn’t solve the social aspect: the shortage of truck drivers around Europe. For longer freight lanes between countries where we combine smaller shipments, we are experimenting with utilizing the rail system and our ‘swap body’ truck system to cope with the driver shortage. Not increasing warehouse handling of goods by using that same swap body on a local truck in the country of destination, is also very helpful and timesaving. We are in active talks with asset-based partners to join us in helping us create a more sustainable service offering. 

Groupage

In terms of software, we utilize and analyse the data of al our pan-European offices and combine smaller shipments within Europe and overseas by having full transparency through the footprint. Again, we save lots of empty trucks or container loads, and splitting the charges and emissions for sea freight among customers makes it a more attractive service offering.

Software

Any software that adds value on multiple sides of the business is explored. Reducing carbon emissions or hours in traffic while providing a more flexible client experience by doing virtual surveys is a perfect example that grew explosively due to the Covid restrictions. The next objectives will be digitizing the historical package of paperwork from one partner to another and trying to digitally integrate that data flow together between movers.

ABOUT GOSSELIN: 

Founded in 1930, Gosselin currently employs more than 975 people who generate total sales of over 450 million Euros. Gosselin’s headquarters is located on the Albert Canal in Deurne where the container terminal connects the Port of Antwerp Bruges and the Port of Rotterdam with the European hinterland. With 56 offices in 34 countries, the company has strong representation in Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and China. The Gosselin Group consists of two divisions: Gosselin Moving and Gosselin Logistics.  

Gosselin Moving handles international moves for multinationals, expats, diplomats, military personnel and private individuals.  

Gosselin Logistics provides logistics services to businesses, with activities ranging from forwarding, warehouse storage and container processing to industrial logistics projects for heavy machinery and entire factories.