ColaLife is a new organization that has realized that humanitarian aid could piggyback on the logistical operations normally used to distribute for-profit products. As described by Daniel Bachhuber:
ColaLife is a “campaign to try and leverage the distribution muscle of a multi-national corporate institution to get life saving medicines to children in developing countries.” In short, to convince the Coca-Cola Corporation that it is worthwhile to distribute rehydration salts through their robust and well-developed delivery network, apparently a weakness of most non-governmental organizations.
The idea reminds me of all those post-Katrina stories about how Walmart trucks were back on the road and shipping in products immediately even as government aid floundered.
It also brought me back to an old idea I’ve been kicking around: the green/sustainable/GOOD logistics company. In the new no-physical-product world that most analysts and green thinkers live in, moving what you sell is literally as easy as clicking a button. But in the world of steel and aluminum and fuel, half the battle is just getting product X from point A to point B. The net effect is that, especially within the green movement, logistics are a hugely underrated part of the business equation.
In all those product CO2 calculations — the whole transport line-item — is based on a whole bunch of assumptions about mode of transport and fuel effificiency/use. The hitch is that those things vary so widely and change so often that the value of the calculations is greatly diminished. Try tracking a single product from a single town through the global economy and you find yourself having to take all sorts of data-fuzzing shortcuts. E.g. would rural Indian saffron growers use a diesel truck or a gasoline truck to bring their product into town? From there would they send the product by rail? Or more likely by truck? To which port would the saffron go? Would it get shipped on a container ship or, given the high value to weight ratio, would they choose air freight?
The list of questions becomes so long that for each and every product that it becomes totally unmanageable. And so we make some shortcuts and rough annotations that obscure the small changes that could actually add up to a big change if we could measure them.
So what I’d love to see is a green logistics company that does detailed calculations — with the visibility they have — into exactly what goes into their operation. The transparency alone would probably be enough to command an ethical premium without even changing the operation itself. And then the operation could work on optimizing for fuel cost and carbon intensity, etc.
But that kind of company would probably never control a major chunk of the world logistical market, which is nicely fragmented anyway. Instead, they’d provide huge value to the world by having visibility into the guts of the global economy. Their ability to deploy a new set of accurate sensors in largely unexplored territory would make every carbon footprint calculation a little more accurate. That’s good, amplified.
Image: Daniel Bachhuber
