GRI-Aligned Sustainability Assessment for Cold Storage Logistics

Executive Summary:
Sarah prepared a preliminary sustainability assessment for Dreisbach, a cold storage supply chain company. To develop the skills and adequately prepare herself for the role, she become a GRI Certified Sustainability Professional in the process. The focus of her report was on climate – including a calculation of the company’s Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions – as well as water, waste, air quality, and environmental justice. She outlined the company’s progress in meeting applicable environmental benchmarks and recommended feasible efforts for the company to become more sustainable.

Importance & Collaboration:
This project was important to me because I wanted to help a company become more sustainable and lay to framework for future environmental efforts while gaining experience in sustainability reporting and corporate carbon accounting.

As for the specific company, I worked with Dreisbach, a cold storage supply company with a facility on the Port of Oakland. Dreisbach ships frozen food to and from Asia and trucks it throughout California. My connection to Dreisbach is my dad, who is the Chief Operating Officer at the company. Dreisbach is held to environmental regulations because it is located in the Bay Area, but these are mainly regarding air quality and public health. For example, the trucks that come in and out of the facility are regulated by the California Air Resources Board. However, beyond that, the company does not have an environmental team – let alone person – that deals with sustainability goals or environmental benchmarks.

I visited the facility on the Port of Oakland, called Cool Port, a few years ago when it was first built (it’s a new facility) and noticed there were zero recycle bins on the administrative floors. This is also a company that was slow to transition to an online database and had thousands of boxes with paper files that they threw away after transferring them to the cloud. This always stuck with me. I knew that, despite the building being built to Bay Area standards, the company was probably lacking in many environmental arenas.
Thus, this project was special to me because I really wanted to make a difference and had an audience that was particularly interested and invested in what I had to say (I recognize this was because of my family ties). This was a company that had a lot of room for improvement but was also open to listening and changing.

Impact & Reach:
In order to gain the skillset to prepare a sustainability report, I became a GRI Certified Sustainability Professional. I am preparing my report in accordance with the GRI framework, which includes both quantitative and qualitative performance standards and metrics. The reach of my project was only the company I worked with.

My Role:
I am working alone with a few liaisons at Dreisbach to help me locate datasets and more detailed information on their operations. I toured the facility during spring break to understand what is happening on site. In addition to creating a report that outlines feasible sustainability benchmarks and the company’s progress in meeting them, I’m in the process of quantifying the company’s carbon emissions to produce a very rough estimate of the company’s emissions. Examples of the data I’m gathering is: (1) how many trucks come in and out of the facility each day, (2) where are the trucks going and what route are they taking, (3) how many shiploads does Dreisbach receive a day and how many do they ship out, (4) how many forklifts and operational equipment are used, and are they diesel or CNG, (5) how much electricity does it take to keep such a large refrigerated warehouse operating, and more.