How to Make Your Order Fulfillment More Sustainable

Jump to:

• Fulfilment that Champions an Eco-Friendly Approach
• How an Environmentally Friendly 3PL Can Benefit Your Brand
• Bringing it All Together – How Does a Sustainable 3PL Operate?
• Partner with a Sustainable Fulfillment Company Today

Fulfillment that Champions an Eco-Friendly Approach

This type of partnership – where all parties are dedicated to preserving the natural world – is highly desirable and extremely powerful. Sustainable fulfillment encompasses every stage of order handling, from storage, picking and gift-wrapping to personalization, packing and delivery. 

3rd-party logistics companies have their work cut out on this front. To achieve a sustainable approach, every facet of the fulfillment process needs to be made as sustainable as possible.

How an Environmentally Friendly 3PL Can Benefit Your Brand

Of course, every effort your fulfillment company makes towards operating more sustainably will have a knock-on effect on your own organization.

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits your brand can see when working with a sustainable 3PL.

Eco-Friendly Packaging

The fulfillment industry is currently seeing a big push towards plastic-free packaging, with recycled cardboard and paper alternatives taking the front seat.

Perfecting your packaging is a must for any brand mindful of its impact on the environment. After all, your packaging affects the customer’s perception of your brand, so there’s a real urgency to move away from environmentally-harmful packaging solutions that contain plastics and other non-recyclable substances with a significant carbon footprint.

With a sustainable fulfillment company, you’ll be able to choose packaging that suits your needs – meaning if you want plastic-free packaging on all orders shipped under your brand’s name, this is very likely achievable.

Your 3PL should also demonstrate a commitment to recycling wherever possible. At ILG, for example, we recycled 418 tons of cardboard and 22 tons of plastic in 2024.

Sustainably-Operated Warehouse Facilities

The more sustainably your goods are stored and handled, the more sustainable your brand becomes. This is the impact of eco-friendly storage facilities; they can be an essential link in your sustainable supply chain and an extension of your brand’s own efforts to become greener.  

In this new era of environmentally conscious fulfillment, warehouse efficiency and sustainability go hand-in-hand. Working with a 3PL provider that demonstrates a measurable move towards sustainably-run facilities can potentially shape the way your audience views your brand.

Pay Attention to the Little Details

It’s often in the seemingly simple details that a business’s dedication to sustainability is most evident. When choosing your 3PL provider, pay attention to its internal systems and whether eco-friendly processes are in place. 

For instance, paperless invoicing may seem like a comparatively small initiative, but a global fulfillment company with multiple daily operations could save up to 1.5 million pieces of paper every year – per client!

An Eco-Friendly Delivery Service

Last but not least: delivery methods. How a brand chooses to deliver goods to consumers is often the most obvious demonstration of its commitment to a greener future.

Consumers are savvy on the environmental impact of a given brand’s delivery services – which means brands have had to become savvy, too. From hybrid and all-electric delivery vehicles to carbon offset programmes, fulfillment companies are ideally placed to find the most eco-conscious carrier solutions that match the needs of a sustainable supply chain, endearing the brands they work with to their end customers.

Bringing it All Together – How Does a Sustainable 3PL Operate?

At ILG, sustainability is one of our strategic cornerstones and is intricately woven into how we operate as a business. Behaving sustainably and setting ambitious targets, such as our ‘Zero-By-Thirty’ mission, is the way to a greener future for both our clients and their customers.

So, how can we enhance the sustainability of your order fulfillment?

Zero-Landfill Waste

At ILG, none of our waste is sent to landfill. We partnered with Grundon in 2016 to ensure all of our waste is either recycled or used to produce energy, which can generate electricity sufficient enough to power 60,000 homes. 

The logistics industry can be wasteful, so it’s vital that we implement measures to combat that in meaningful ways. Committing to cutting out landfill waste at every level of our business is one of them.

Read more about our partnership with Grundon and how we achieved a 77% recycling rate in 2024.

Running Sustainable Facilities

ILG is currently in an exciting stage of growth. As we look towards the future, we’re dedicated to ensuring that each new facility we bring on-stream is run as sustainably as possible.

This means kitting out our new facilities with eco-friendly features such as:

• Motion-sensitive LED lighting 
• Electric machinery such as forklifts and lift platforms 
• Energy-efficient heating and ventilation
• Electric vehicle charging stations
• Solar panels
• Plentiful skylights to maximise natural light
• Rainwater harvesting

This is with a view to attaining an EPC rating of ‘A’, as well as a BREEAM rating of ‘Excellent’ or ‘Outstanding’ for our newest facilities. We don’t just want to achieve the bare minimum; we’re dedicated to operating as efficiently as possible, giving our clients peace of mind that their fulfillment partner shares their vision for a more sustainable future.

In 2024, we opened two new sustainable fulfilment centers in the UK and EU. The first in Poland and the second in Northampton, transitioning to these highly sustainable warehouses is a crucial part of our shift to Net-Zero by 2030.

Sustainable Partnerships

In addition to fitting our warehouses with facilities that run more sustainably and leveraging renewable energy, we’re also committed to partnerships with green energy suppliers and other service providers.

We’ve switched to Green Electricity and Green Gas suppliers to reduce our carbon footprint and energy consumption, and wherever possible we choose to work with partners that share our dedication to ‘going green’.

Driving Change Through Education and Engagement

Running a number of initiatives and awareness months such as ‘Sustainable September‘ promotes understanding of sustainability issues and embeds greener practices across our facilities. These initiatives are designed to drive change through education and engagement, keeping staff engaged and up to date with our ESG policies and strategy.

At ILG, we also have a special committee of eco-employees known as ‘Green Champions’ who work across our sites in the UK dedicated to promoting sustainable practices and behaviors as well as a quarterly newsletter, ‘GreeNews’.

Partner with a Sustainable Fulfillment Company Today

Partnering with a sustainable 3PL company means partnering with a brighter future – and establishing your business as a frontrunner in the eco-friendly revolution.

At ILG, we’re proud to be leading the line on sustainability in the fulfillment industry. Since setting our target of cutting ILG’s CO2 footprint by 35% by March 2023 and achieving this 8 months ahead of the target deadline, we’re proud to say we have reduced our CO2 emissions by 80%. Now we’ve set a new, more ambitious target of being a carbon neutral business by 2030.

If you’re looking to make your order fulfillment more sustainable, we’d love to hear from you. Find out how we can help by contacting us today.