The transportation industry is often characterized as dirty, heavy resource consuming, while producing an elevated level of harmful pollutants. At Bandstra Transportation we prove that “green” can still describe our sector. We strongly believe that reducing our environmental impact and developing a more sustainable business model is not only good for business but also a part of our social responsibility. Check out what we are doing to help improve our world as we become greener:
Reduced Fuel Consumption:
- Our entire fleet is equipped with a power-saving feature that automatically shuts down the engine after 10 minutes of continuous idling.
- By installing Auxiliary Power Units (APU) in all of our highway trucks, our drivers are able to heat or cool their unit with the main engine turned off.
- In association with the British Columbia Ministry of Transportation, we have been chosen and agreed to run the pilot project for their new transponder program, due to our exemplary industry record. This program utilizing transponders that communicates to the government truck scales, enabling our equipment to automatically be weighed while driving full speed, bypassing the scale. By not slowing down and stopping at the scale we are able to save a dramatic amount of fuel.
Tires Performance:
- Tires naturally lose inflation over time resulting in inefficiencies, reduced fuel economy, decreased lifetime, and more. This is why we have paid position on staff dedicated to maintain our fleet’s tires.
- Regular checks of tire inflation pressures.
- Utilizing retreaded tires in our tire program results in a significant reducing in the oil consumed in the manufacturing processes. A typical tire requires around 22 gallons of oil; however, our retreaded tires require less than 7 gallons of oil.
Environmental-friendly engines:
- Constant upgrading of our fleet to implement new equipment with engines that burn more efficiently and cleanly.
- New engines reduce emissions.
Speed Limit Policies:
- Rigorous testing has shown that through our speed limit policies our trucks have shown dramatic improvements to their fuel efficiently and a reduction in harmful greenhouse gases.
Strict Safety Procedures:
- We have some of the lowest ratio of on-highway accidents in our industry. By reducing the speed of our equipment and making our crews more aware of all safety measures we can ensure that we do not have wasted resources often associated with accidents.
Satellite Tracking:
- Every piece of highway equipment is monitored to measure driver performance. This equipment tracks their global position, speed, RPM revving of the engine, hard brakes occurrence, and idling. By proving this information back to our drivers, they can adjust their driving habits to improve the vehicle performance while reducing emissions.
Equipment Maintenance:
- By running a preventive maintenance program, we are ensuring that we do not wait until our equipment is dramatically damaged before we repair it. Through a computer-monitored program, we inspect our equipment on regular intervals enabling us to catch damaged and inefficient parts well before they cause harm.
- Less break downs of equipment means less down time and less wasted consumption of resources.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle:
- Reuse and sell previously used packing material whenever possible, often picking up these items from the customer's residence free of charge.
- We are continually moving our company towards a paperless environment. Our accounting department has already moved to becoming almost entirely paperless.
- By encouraging our customers to also reducing their paper consumption, we offer a variety of electronic solutions to them when it comes to receiving their invoices and monthly statements.
- Scanning and indexing every document in our company and making these files available to our office staff, we are able to reduce our use of printers, photocopiers, and fax machines.
- The most important part of the 3 R's is Reduce and Reuse but sometimes we cannot avoid using resources, that is why many of our terminals are committed recycling as much as possible to help become more environmentally friendly.
