Sustainability in one form or another has been a hallmark of Mississauga, Ont.-based Musket Transport. From its recycling efforts to monitoring the energy needed to light and heat its facilities, minimizing consumption and the related costs just made sense.
Economics may have been the principal driver in previous years; today, it’s reducing the company’s impact on the environment, says Sophia Sniegowski Begidzhanov, corporate communications officer and Musket Transport and its wholly owned driver training center, CHET, or Commercial Heavy Equipment Training.
“Aside from the overall business objective, where we always had this underlying sustainability effort, we’re working now to minimize our carbon footprint, especially our fuel,” she says. “We solidified that plan in 2016, setting the baseline when we joined the Climate Smart program through the Mississauga Board of Trade.”
Climate Smart is a software, training, and sustainability adviser-supported program that enables businesses to start their transition to net zero by measuring, reducing, and reporting their corporate carbon footprint.
Musket was the first transport company in Canada to enroll in the program.
“We received detailed annual reports from 2016 through 2019 that covered all of our carbon footprint, including our utilities, the buildings, etc.,” says Sniegowski Begidzhanov. “It was telling, but it just reaffirmed our assumptions that none of our other carbon outputs even come close to our fuel.”
Musket has turned the corner on the properties it owns. It has been upgrading roofs and windows, installing LED lighting, and implementing recycling programs. It is currently upgrading some of their exterior terminal lighting to LED. All these proved fairly costly, relative to the GHG reduction achieved, but it’s moving Musket in the right direction.
“Climate Smart offered a lot of useful suggestions for GHG reduction, but they seem mostly geared toward other types of business,” she says.
Among the sustainability initiatives launched this year was an internal ‘Green Team’ for employees from different divisions to share ideas on how to improve their facilities.
Musket partnered with the Credit Valley Conservation Foundation to start a planting project at the head office to reintroduce nature into industrial operations. A similar initiative at the Southdown Road container terminal resulted in an outdoor break area for staff that maintains the area’s natural ambiance, even though it’s been largely industrialized.
One of the staff members at the terminal painted a mural on an unused container that reflects the original landscape of the area.
“We can do little things that still have an impact. They can motivate and inspire employees, because this is now something that affects them every day,” says Sniegowski Begidzhanov.
The Climate Smart experience provided some valuable learnings. It also validated the direction the president and owner were taking the company, and “the reports provided something concrete we could share with customers,” she says.
The fleet side
Musket, in business since 1993, currently runs a fleet of 280 company-owned trucks along with 46 owner-operators. It owns 300 dry van and reefer trailers as well as 600 container chassis/flatbed trailers.
Its core business is running intermodal containers between Toronto and Montreal and the U.S. Eastern Seaboard. Musket also operates the third largest container terminal in Ontario with capacity to service up to 750 containers per day.
Musket recently installed more than 300 plug-ins to keep the refrigerated containers running electrically rather than using their onboard diesel engines.
For all the work the company did with its facilities, the biggest carbon reduction impacts have come from training fuel-efficient drivers from the outset at CHET, and constantly upgrading to the more efficient powertrain offerings from its supplier, Volvo Trucks.
“Fuel is our greatest expense, so it’s very much in our interest to minimize the fuel burn as much as possible,” says Sniegowski Begidzhanov. “We do that through continually investing in state-of-the-art equipment for the fleet and the career college.”
For example, CHET owns two driving simulators, which give students a realistic training experience without burning any fuel at all. By they time they get to a real truck, they have the muscle memory of how to drive properly, so they aren’t wasting fuel while they are learning.
CHET teaches the Smart Driver for Highway Trucking from Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) to get drivers onboard with fuel saving techniques, right from the start.
The EV conundrum
While electric trucks might seem like the obvious path to a zero-emission future, Musket sees EVs going nowhere fast right now. Sniegowski Begidzhanov says customers are asking about EVs mostly because they have to report emissions across their supply chains through Scope 3 (third-party partners).
However, there’s utterly no financial support from that side of the business.
“So far, that’s been a categorical ‘no’,” she says. “They’re not willing to pay a higher cost for the delivery with an EV. That’s where we’re hitting a wall.”
Musket’s core operation is in the 350- to 500-mile range, so EVs are out — for now. They have a small fleet of day cabs doing P&D work, but EVs are a stretch even there. Musket recently implemented an R&D project to determine the viability of using battery-powered trucks on local routes.
“That’s a big part of what this R&D project is about; trying to find the necessary partners to create that infrastructure and ecosystem to support an EV,” she says.
Sniegowski Begidzhanov says she’s cautiously optimistic about the future, hoping “technological advancements may overcome infrastructure setbacks,” but overall, she’s disappointed in the level of support the industry receives from various levels of government.
“Unfortunately, because we operate from Ontario, we only have federal grants to assist with the purchase of the equipment, and they shave off only a fraction of the initial cost,” she laments.
Subsidies for heavy trucks announced two years ago amount to $150,000 per Class 8 truck, and they are available to any truck owner in Canada. But Sniegowski Begidzhanov questions why those grants are not being targeted for the trucking hubs in Canada, like Peel Region.
“With the grants available right now, they’re just not at [the] level needed to make [electrification] a sound business decision,” she says. “The city of Mississauga has its own Climate Leaders program, and they have their own climate change-related agenda items. I think it would be to its advantage to also help support private businesses in [making] those jumps to alleviate the carbon footprint that is being generated in Mississauga. To me, that’s a really pressing issue for the city of Mississauga and the Region of Peel in general, because we’re the trucking hub of Canada.”
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