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Tyler Nickel FourKites headshotTyler NickelDirector, Product Marketing, FourKites

If you’re operating a facility over 250,000 square feet in Southern California, new changes are about to take effect that will require you to disclose your emissions. The new rules are intended to incentivize your business to reduce localized emissions at warehouses. Read on to find out what this means for your business and how to unlock emissions reductions potentials across your operations.

What is Rule 2305?

SCAQMD approved Rule 2305 back in May of 2021. Rule 2305 creates the Warehouse Actions and Investments to Reduce Emissions (WAIRE) Program — the first of its kind in the nation. The new rule is a sustainability initiative that incentivizes warehouse operators to invest in processes and technologies that reduce diesel particulate matter and nitrous oxide emissions in their warehouse operations. The program’s carbon accounting provides guidelines on how to measure your points compliance obligation and provides methods on how to earn credits towards them.

When does Rule 2305 go into effect?

If you operate a warehouse over 250,000 square feet in size, this rule went into effect in May 2021. Facilities of this size will need to disclose their first WAIRE report on January 31, 2023. Moving forward, facilities between 150,000 square feet and 250,000 square feet of capacity will need to disclose starting on January 31, 2024. And the final remaining warehouses over 100,000 square feet are set to disclose on January 31, 2025.

How does Rule 2305’s WAIRE Program work?

The WAIRE Program established a point system that requires warehouse operators to earn WAIRE Points and generate a WPCO score.

What is a WPCO Score?

Your WAIRE Points Compliance Obligation (WPCO) score is the number of WAIRE points that your operation must earn each year to avoid fees. Your existing business operations will be measured to generate your unique WPCO score.

Things like total inbound truckloads (with consideration for truck type), warehouse size, and other metrics factor into creating your WPCO score.

Warehouse operators will need to submit their Annual WAIRE Report after each compliance period to confirm they’ve met or exceeded their WPCO.

How to Earn WAIRE Points

The program offers considerable leeway in designing your WAIRE point program, including a menu of predetermined options to incorporate into your strategy, as well as the ability to create customized programs for approval by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD).

Menu items include:

  • Acquiring zero emissions/near-zero emissions trucks
  • Installing on-site zero-emissions/near-zero emissions charging stations
  • Installing solar panels to use in your warehouse operations

Other Ways to Earn WAIRE Points

Are non-zero emissions and electric trucks still too far-reaching to use in your WAIRE program? The SCAQMD understands, which is why they’re allowing companies to submit their own customized plans while they work out their zero-emissions goals. So long as they are measurable and help reduce local warehouse emissions, they should help you generate WAIRE points.

On top of that, efficiency gains can make a difference beyond your sustainability strategy. With financial incentives, operational efficiencies and improved relationships, using this as an opportunity to assess new methods of doing business can pay off quickly, with up to a 20% reduction in yard emissions per tactic.

Appointment Optimization

Right now, your yard may have a full truck queue that you’ve been battling to cut back. You might be well aware of the detention charges this line of trucks brings you as they wait for available docks, but did you know that an idling truck can burn through a gallon of diesel an hour, emitting 22.46 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from your warehouse.

You may think that more dock crews are needed to speed the unloading process along, but the solution may be more complicated than that. Truck queues are directly correlated to the success and failure of a truck to meet an appointment time. If your teams are expecting a truck to arrive at a certain time and they wait, only to find out it’s three hours away, your truck queue will begin to grow.

Taking advantage of software that helps connect your dock schedules to the ETAs of their correlating trucks in-transit helps teams proactively manage against appointments that are in jeopardy. Facility managers can reprioritize dock crews to service early trucks or appointments in progress, reducing truck queues and their emissions.

Drop & Hook Programs

While live loads may seem to be the simplest way to manage your business, it provides carriers with a razor thin margin to make their pickups or deliveries. With so much variability across the network – and within your own yard operations – opting for a looser drop & hook program could be beneficial to the success of your operations and your endeavors in reducing yard emissions.

Along with appointment optimization, drop & hook significantly reduces in-yard emissions by reducing dwell. Where queues to perform a live load or unload can amount to 4.4 hrs/truck/day (4.4 gallons of diesel or over 98 lbs. CO2/truck), drop & hook programs can allow drivers to quickly terminate their trailer into a designated parking spot to be loaded/unloaded at the facility’s leisure, getting a truck in and out of your yard in a matter of minutes.

But with drop & hook programs, there’s a new degree of uncertainty and coordination. With some of the largest supply chains managing trailer pools into the hundreds, it’s important to have a digital workflow to coordinate and execute your daily operations quickly. Some leading yard management systems (commonly referred to as a YMS) provide prescriptive workflows, trailer dwell monitoring, temperature monitoring and more to help set up a drop & hook program while generating additional value for your operations.

LTL Consolidations & Sailing Schedules

If you’re frequently shipping LTL, you may be increasing your yard traffic by shipping to the same location multiple times a week. The truth is, while most 53’ trailers can support 26 rows of pallets, many don’t take advantage of that space, simply due to not being able to maximize cubage with all of the occupants. If you hold onto inventory to build full truckloads, you can create a lot of benefits for your business, including reducing truck traffic on-site.

Sailing schedules create a lot of value by sidestepping LTL rate volatility and getting you access to the economies of scale that full truckload can offer. The downside is that if you’ve been shipping LTL for a long time, there’s probably an operational reason to do so. For many companies, breaking shipments into smaller bits over the course of a week is a hedged bet against network uncertainty. However, by using visibility software, shippers and consignees are better able to trust transit information and manage their processes around them by using accurate ETAs.

Visibility: The Key to Rule 2305

Whether you’re deep into your sustainability journey or just getting started with Rule 2305, the first step is always measuring your baseline. How will you know if your strategies are effective if you don’t know where you’re starting? Supply chain visibility platforms can provide you with essential sustainability data from across your operations. Visibility platforms that measure sustainability data can help quantify your baseline and help you formulate your long-term strategy.

If you’re looking to better understand your emissions data, or if you’re looking to rein in the part of your business responsible for up to 90% of your emissions, FourKites is here to help! We’ve got the tools to get you where you want to be, and the expertise to help get you started. To find out more, contact us now.

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