PSC LIVE: Sustainability – Q&A with John Trenchard, DP World

Taking place at the QEII Centre in London, Procurement & Supply Chain: Sustainability is dedicated to exploring the intersection of procurement, supply chain and sustainability. 

Across two days, attendees are being given a golden opportunity to network with industry professionals from some of the biggest companies in the world, while learning how to craft effective Scope 3 strategies. 

After delivering his opening keynote, John Trenchard, VP Commerical and Supply Chain UK at DP World, spoke to Supply Chain Digital about the integration of sustainable practices into logistics. 

Tell us a bit about you and your role

I'm John Trenchard and I'm responsible for supply chain for DP World in our Ports and Terminals (P&Ts) business here in the UK.

We operate two large ports in the UK: London Gateway, which is just down the road, and Southampton. We handle about half the import and export containers coming in and going out of the country. 

Can you give us a brief rundown of your opening keynote?

It's been great to be invited here and it was great to see so many people engaged and interested in the keynote. 

I ran thought our customers' problems and the need to address Scope 3 emissions, which are the emissions further up and downstream in the supply chain.  

A lot of progress has been made on operational emissions – Scope one and scope two – within businesses, but it's much more difficult to address Scope 3 emissions. That's where we're trying to provide a partnership approach, offering visibility and sustainable choices for customers in the supply chain.

I'm looking forward to the various follow-up sessions covering this. We've got a workshop on Thursday (6 March) where we're going to be exploring some of these options further.

How is DP World integrating sustainable practices into its operations? 

We've spent a lot of time trying to remove fossil fuels from our operations; in fact, we no longer burn them in the UK in our P&Ts business.

We've looked a lot at using a hybrid and increasingly-electric design. We've invested more than £450m in the first fully-electric terminal at London Gateway, which is an exciting investment.

And then we're also looking at how to provide low-carbon options for our customers adjacent to our business. We've launched an award-winning Modal Shift Programme (MSP) which has taken 100,000 containers off the road and onto rail. 

We've just launched an innovative Carbon Inset Programme trial, where customers are credited a carbon inset for the volumes coming through the port and we're generating that by using lower-carbon fuels for container vessels in and around Europe. That's available now and we've had more than 150,000 containers sign up already. I'd encourage companies to explore that and see how they can pragmatically address their Scope 3 emissions today. 

Sustainability goals often clash with cost pressures, especially in procurement and supply chain – how can businesses strike the right balance?

More and more people have sustainability on their agenda. In my speech, I mentioned that something like 64% of consumers are prepared to pay a small premium for more sustainable products. 

We've also got the technologies available now to help us make lower-carbon choices and, often, this is about visibility. But the big challenge for all of us is framing it so we give customers choices, embrace opportunities and find a way to have a business model to actually pay it. 

We've explored several of these choice, perhaps looking at inverse charging or charging a slight premium for bad behaviour and incentivising good behaviour. But you have to be very careful and it has to be proportionate to the value of the impact we're making. What I'd encourage is for people to get involved, start a dialogue and let's see what's possible.

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