FLEETDRIVE
sit here today , over 95 % of our light passenger fleet are now hybrid petrol electrics . We pretty much save a third of our fuel bill on every one of those vehicles as compared to running a full petrol equivalent vehicle .
What other benefits have come from the changes ?
The way we approach it is through a lens of sustainability . A lot of the time , people hear sustainability and think it ’ s just environmental but there ’ s really three elements to sustainability – environmental , social and economic . We find that those three elements are not mutually exclusive but they are in fact mutually beneficial .
Whenever we ’ ve reduced our carbon emissions , including for our fleet , we found that we ’ ve saved on costs . We ’ re using less energy and we ’ re being more energy efficient . So it ’ s more money that falls to the bottom line that we can put back into our community service programs , while also looking after the environment . We offer residential facilities and the energy costs are lower in those settings , and there ’ s a number of social benefits that are attached to it such as cleaner air for our clients .
What are the ongoing challenges that you think will need to be considered to hit the net zero target ?
When we set the target to be carbon neutral we had a bit of an idea how we ’ re going to get there , but we had to work it out pretty quickly . Again we ’ ve got a fair idea how we will approach this new goal , but it ’ s going to be a work in progress .
When we started looking at our transportation , we ’ re looking at our company fleet , our grey fleet and our employees commuting to and from work – it all counts towards our carbon footprint . You put all those three together and that ’ s 45 per cent of our carbon footprint being transport related . We ’ ve had to look at each individual category and work out how we could eliminate carbon emissions .
I mentioned we have hybrids . We now need to look at how we can further eliminate emissions . At the moment we ’ re looking at electric vehicles ( EVs ) – whether they ’ re just pure EVs or fuel cell powered EVs – and we ’ re hoping to be able to do a trial on EVs for our fleet soon .
ISSUE 30 AUGUST 2021 / WWW . AFMA . ORG . AU 13