The Future of Fleet Sustainability: Why Electrification Alone Isn’t Enough
Nowadays, the topic of fleet sustainability can revolve heavily around the industry’s transition to electric commercial vehicles. While EVs undeniably have an enormous role to play in fleet carbon reduction, the challenge of end-to-end sustainability doesn’t begin or end with their roll-out.
To really lead the way in sustainability, fleets must broaden their approach from an exclusive focus on in-transit carbon output, to reducing waste, pollution, and promoting circular practices at every end of their supply chain - from vehicle purchasing, to repair, maintenance, and eventual disposal.
In this article, we discuss five key priorities to drive sustainability for the future of fleet management, aside from the inevitable transition to low-carbon vehicles…
Why Electric Vehicles are Just Part of the Answer
EVs are just one piece in the puzzle of fleet sustainability - and while a prominent one - getting the most from them relies heavily on fleets emphasising best practice throughout the rest of their supply chain.
Sustainability isn’t all about carbon output!
The fact is, sustainability doesn’t start and finish with carbon output. While it’s undeniably a critical part of any fleet’s strategy, carbon reduction is just one of many areas fleets must tackle in order to truly minimise their environmental impact.
Waste management, circular recycling, traffic calming, and - critically - EV battery disposal, are equally as vital for long-term sustainability as the transition to low-carbon vehicles itself.
Top 5 Priorities for Driving Sustainability in Fleet
sopp+sopp work with some of the UK’s best-known fleets to deliver fully-tailored, end-to-end vehicle management solutions, which actively assist in delivering sustainability throughout the supply chain.
"At sopp+sopp, we understand that sustainability goes beyond just choosing the right vehicles - it's about optimising every touchpoint in the vehicle lifecycle.
By combining expertise in accident management with market-level insights, we help fleets maximise use of green parts, streamline repair processes, and reduce overall environmental impact.
Sustainability is built into everything we do, from asset management and repair, to end-of-life disposal - including battery disposal and recycling opportunities with EVs. This means we can always empower your fleet to operate as efficiently and responsibly as possible." - Chris Beeby, Director of Business Development
With this in mind, here are the top five priorities we view as critical to the future of sustainability in fleet:
1 - Reducing Waste Throughout the Vehicle Lifecycle
Commercial vehicles produce a lot of waste throughout their lifecycles - from scrap parts, to used fluids, batteries, tyres, and even consumables and their packaging.
While fleets have long been focused on reducing waste sent to landfill, their future strategies should prioritise circular recycling where possible, to further reduce waste and energy consumption.
Strategies to promote circular vehicle recycling could include:
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Ringfencing your fleet’s end-of-service, or total loss vehicles for parts salvage can be an incredibly impactful way to promote circular recycling within your repair supply chain. Not only does utilising these ‘green’ parts and components reduce waste, and need for intensive recycling, but it can also reduce your fleet’s repair outlay and cycle times.
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Liquids like antifreeze, engine oil, washer fluid, and fuels, can be safely recovered from your end-of-life assets, and either used directly in other vehicles, or remanufactured into shelf-quality products. Many salvage & recovery partners can handle this process on your fleet’s behalf, giving you peace of mind that hazardous fluids are not only disposed of responsibly, but are recycled wherever possible.
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Tyres are one of the highest turnover parts within any fleet. While they can easily be recycled back to raw rubber, this process can be energy-intensive - making circular recycling preferable where possible. Depending on their condition, many of the tyres your fleet disposes of could actually be refurbished and retreaded, for direct reuse - up to 5-6 times before needing to be disposed of!
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Battery recycling can be an incredibly energy-intensive process. However, many used vehicle batteries can actually be remanufactured, or reused directly if they’re in good enough condition. This principle applies to everything from small 12-volt batteries, to the large lithium ion batteries found in EVs, provided fleets can forge the right partnerships early on to cope with increased EV rollout.
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Fleet consumables - like washer fluid, wiper blades, bulbs, and filters - can be an enormous contributor to your waste footprint. Overcoming this challenge means partnering with suppliers who either seek to minimise packaging (e.g. through bulk shipping), maximise use of recyclable materials, or provide circular recycling of used containers, fluids, or components.
Of course, not all vehicle materials can be reused directly. Fleets must also focus on ensuring their end-of-life vehicle supply chains prioritise maximum raw materials recovery, so even unsalvageable assets are disposed of responsibly - with minimal waste generated.
To learn more about raw materials recovery, read our full overview of the end-of-life vehicle recycling process here.
2 - Solving the ‘Last Mile’ Conundrum
Exhaust emissions aren’t the only impact vehicles have on our environment. Inner-city congestion, even with electric vehicles, has the potential to produce harmful emissions, and harm biodiversity.
Solving the ‘last mile’ conundrum must therefore be a core focus for the future of fleet sustainability. This means minimising the use of large commercial vehicles inner-city, particularly in congested areas, for the ‘last mile’ of the logistics or delivery journey.
Last-mile optimisation strategies may include:
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Route optimisation is key to reducing the impact of last mile logistics. It’s not just about making the delivery as fast as possible for the customer, but also seeking to minimise inner-city congestion, by reducing use of built-up areas during peak hours or busy periods. This means taking a dynamic approach to route planning - reviewing telematics data in-depth to identify the quickest, slowest, and more efficient routes at key times, and ensuring they’re utilised by drivers when most effective.
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‘Out-of-home’ deliveries are becoming increasingly popular amongst both fleets and their customers alike, and can be incredibly effective for reducing last-mile delivery durations. Solutions like drop-off points and parcel lockers are now a common site in major cities, and enable fleets to minimise both delivery time and distance travelled - while retaining convenience for the end customer.
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With the ‘last mile’ becoming such an important topic in commercial transport, many businesses are partnering with specialist delivery providers who operate in inner-city regions. This enables fleets to harness the benefits of alternative vehicles like e-bikes, trikes, and micro EVs without investing in these assets themselves.
Some inner-city fleets have already begun harnessing alternative vehicles, and out-of-home delivery infrastructure as a self-deployed last mile solution. However, it’s clear that more collaboration is required between fleets, their leasing providers, and manufacturers to establish workable solutions for inner-city commercial transport on a sector-wide scale.
3 - Achieving Data-Driven Efficiency Strategies
Data has an invaluable role to play in driving fleet efficiency, and helping to both prioritise & evidence sustainability initiatives. This applies not only to the data your fleet holds internally, but also the insights that could be provided by your suppliers & partners, or acquired from the wider industry. Here are some of the data-driven strategies your fleet could harness:
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Far from just getting the core principles right, a truly effective fleet efficiency strategy must also be underpinned by clear data, which both evidences its impact, and informs future optimisations. This means working with suppliers to secure regular data sharing throughout the supply chain - from green parts utilisation & waste disposal metrics from repairers, to up-to-date recycling rates from disposal partners.
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As well as measuring internal improvements, fleets must also understand how their sustainability strategies weigh up against the wider industry. This means harnessing market-wide data to benchmark the performance of your core sustainability initiatives, and their impact on your bottom-line environmental footprint. Collaborating with industry bodies, suppliers, and even similar fleets can help fleets to understand trends in adoption of green principles, navigate emerging innovations, and gauge reactions to new regulatory standards.
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Effective vehicle procurement is pivotal to the success of your fleet’s long-term environmental strategies. Whether you’re looking to purchase EVs, AFVs, or even ICE vehicles - it’s critical that you understand which vehicles to replace, what their replacements should be, and equally, which vehicles you should seek to retain. Reviewing parts availability, average repair costs, duration, and on-the-road efficiency is an impactful way to both gauge the compatibility of new vehicles at market, and understand the value in retaining vs replacing existing stock.
Learn more about data-driven vehicle purchasing in our Fleet Vehicle Acquisition Guide
Of course, it’s one thing having the data - analysing it for trends & insight is another task entirely. Fleets must ensure they have the resource and technology available, either within their own ranks or through external suppliers, to devise actionable strategies from the data they have at their disposal.
4 - Unifying Goals within the Fleet Supply Chain
Of course, driving sustainability can never be a solely internal exercise, especially for commercial fleets, which often have diverse & multi-functional supply chains. To truly deliver on environmental objectives, operators must engage their suppliers and management partners directly, and collaborate to ensure sustainability goals are prioritised at all ends.
Strategies could include:
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Vehicle repair can be one of the biggest contributors to your fleet’s waste footprint. Countering this means working closely with your repair & maintenance partners, to ensure sustainable principles - such as repair over replace, energy reduction, and green parts sourcing - can be harnessed effectively, and evidenced to support your objectives.
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While your fleet’s suppliers may have defined specialist remits, there’s often huge overlap when it comes to their impact on efficiency & sustainability. For example, joining the dots between accident management and scheduled maintenance partners can help to ensure the same focus on sustainable principles is instilled at all ends of vehicle upkeep. Encouraging suppliers to share intelligence, data, and methodologies is critical for achieving supply chain cohesion, and can even help your fleet to reduce costs and maximise efficiency throughout the vehicle lifecycle.
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To truly combat the environmental footprint of your fleet’s supply chain, you need to make responsible practices non-negotiable for your suppliers. This means embedding core sustainable principles in contracts and service agreements - such as corporate carbon reduction, waste management, and circular recycling - and requiring suppliers to evidence their performance on a regular basis. Even if your suppliers aren’t quite meeting expectations currently, adding formal goals within service agreements, alongside clear collaboration, can help them improve more quickly, and benefit all parties.
The great thing about cross-supply chain collaboration is that it serves to benefit everyone involved - from your fleet itself, to its repairers, insurers, onward suppliers, and their own business strategies. The key lies in communicating the value of this collaboration to your suppliers, and ensuring all discussions amount to practical steps towards long-term improvement.
5 - Solving the Sustainability Challenges of EVs Themselves
As well as only being one piece in the puzzle of fleet sustainability, EVs also pose their own environmental challenges, which fleets must consider closely to harness their benefits effectively. While overcoming these challenges may not be solely the responsibility of fleet operators, their input and buying habits are vital tools in forming the future landscape of the industry.
Here are some steps your fleet could take:
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Just as when sourcing any other asset, it’s vital that fleets ensure the electric vehicles they purchase are sourced responsibly, with lifecycle sustainability in mind. This means researching models and manufacturers, and comparing their approach to materials sourcing (particularly for batteries), vehicle design, shipping, and circular recycling of parts and components. Many manufacturers are increasingly prioritising modular vehicle designs which can be built, repaired, and disposed of more responsibly, with a focus on circular recycling. Looking to the future, fleets must consider this a critical purchasing factor in order to truly minimise the environmental footprint of the vehicle lifecycle.
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As mentioned, EV batteries - particularly the lithium-ion variety - can pose significant environmental risks, from the sourcing of their core materials, to how they’re disposed of at the end of their lives. The only real way for fleets to mitigate this challenge is to prioritise manufacturers who are committed to sustainable sourcing, promoting circular battery recycling, and design their vehicles with end-of-life disposal in mind. In the long-term, it’s clear that collaboration is needed right across the automotive supply chain - from manufacturers, to fleets and their recycling partners - to achieve more environmentally-robust battery solutions.
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We’ve already covered the importance of circular recycling in vehicle parts procurement. However, with many EVs still being fairly new to the market, it can be a challenge for repairers to source sustainable, locally-sourced alternatives to brand-new OE components. In order for fleets to apply the same circular approach to EVs, they must focus on building their own green parts supply chains - by ringfencing components from their own end-of-life stock for reuse.
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The question of EV charging is one of the most prominent discussions surrounding their roll-out. One one hand, fleets must ensure they have the infrastructure available to operate these vehicles long-term, both on and off-premises. On the other, they must seek to ensure the energy used to power charging points is sustainably sourced - which can be another challenge entirely. The answer could lie in building partnerships with charging companies who prioritise sustainable grid infrastructure, or even investing in on-site technology to generate renewable energy from the source - depending entirely on your fleet’s scale and budget.
With the UK’s ZEV mandate fast approaching, it’s clear that fleets need to get ahead of the ‘EV question’, with a comprehensive understanding of how these vehicles operate, the impact they have on cost & performance, and their unique sustainability challenges.
James Fisher of Gecko Risk, sopp+sopp’s EV & AFV insight partners, comments:
“Battery repairability and replaceability is an ongoing issue for the EV sector, with many insurers writing off relatively new vehicles due to any kind of battery damage. If write off frequency for EVs is higher than ICE vehicles, this will be enormously damaging to fleet sustainability.”
“Industry wide diagnostics and repair techniques are required, which will involve understanding the data and in-depth collaboration between insurers, manufacturers, repair networks and fleets.” - James Fisher, CEO, Gecko Risk limited
How can sopp+sopp support your fleet?
Carbon Neutrality from the Ground Up
As part of Activate Group, we’re proud to be a carbon neutral organisation. All our solutions, services, and supplier partnerships are built from the ground up to prioritise our core sustainability principles. Plus, each of our UK-wide Activate Accident Repair bodyshops harnesses the latest energy saving, recycling, and repair over replace technology, ensuring our customers’ environmental goals are delivered upon at every touchpoint.
Working with Industry-Leading Recycling Partners
We’re proud to say that our vehicle recycling partners, SYNETIQ, currently work ahead of the European End-of-Life Vehicle Directive, achieving recycling rates above 96% of total vehicle materials. Our partners are fully accredited in safe & secure asset disposal across all vehicle types, and share our commitment to helping fleet operators reduce the environmental footprint of every vehicle’s lifecycle.
Total Loss Salvaging & Green Parts Ringfencing
Through our sister company, Activate Parts, we work with fleets to help them make direct use of ‘green’ parts and components reclaimed from their end-of-life vehicles. Through our ‘total loss ringfencing’ solution, we can proactively identify assets which may be eligible for parts salvage, and work with our partners to dismantle them, and store their parts on-site for use in future repairs. This not only helps our customers to reduce future repair outlay, and parts turnaround, for similar vehicles - but also means they’re able to build their own circular parts supply chain in-house, enhancing their sustainability commitments.
Partnering with Leading EV & AFV Data Specialists
In 2023, we partnered with Gecko Risk - specialist providers of data & risk management solutions for the alternative fuel & EV market.
Our partnership gives us access to even more insights & analysis to help fuel our customers’ EV transitions - supporting them in purchasing decisions, operational adaptations, and rollout strategies.
This includes valuable insights around vehicle performance, popularity, and repair costs & turnaround across a range of manufacturers, which empower our customers to identify and mitigate the risks associated with EV adoption.
Delivering a more sustainable fleet lifecycle - find out more about sopp+sopp’s fleet management solutions today: