There’s another area that is coming into the ESG spotlight that investors should be aware of: supply chain. Boston-based Summit Partners believes there is room for improvement in this part and is looking to help out with its investment in 48forty Solutions.
48forty, headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, offers pallet management services including supply, retrieval, on-site services, reverse logistics and retail services. The company’s services are designed to source recycled pallets when and where they are needed.
Pallets are an integral part in logistics and I can see why 48forty sees the importance in recycling them. The company estimates that 85 percent of all U.S. goods travel through the supply chain on a pallet. 48forty, for its part, handles over 300 million pallets a year, and “helps ensure its pallets are processed and put back into the cycle for reuse, helping bring efficiency, sustainability and greater confidence to customers at both ends of the supply chain.”
“Maintaining the integrity and managing the environmental footprint of the supply chain is a strategic imperative for many businesses, and effective pallet management is an important part of this process,” says John Carroll, a managing director at Summit Partners. “We believe 48forty sits at the intersection of commerce enablement, warehouse and distribution supply chains, and ESG initiatives, offering high-quality, end-to-end solutions designed to lower costs and minimize environmental impact.”
There are a lot of conversations going on using metrics to improve ESG quality, but more can still be done, especially on the operations level.
– Demitri Diakantonis
