Green tea

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How Lipton is saving the environment by cutting out wooden pallets.

A forklift truck disappears into the gloom at the back of a storage container, betraying no indication of its movements except for the whirring and hissing of hydraulics. It emerges again into the glaring sunlight, the driver obscured behind a towering stack of brown bags carrying loose tea.

It is a scene like any other. The only noticeable difference is that instead of being carried on a wooden pallet, the 1.5 tonne load is borne on a simple sheet of cardboard.

This humble tool is a slipsheet - a cost-saving device that is increasingly being used by logistics firms to stack goods higher in shipping containers.

Pioneering its use in the Middle East is Unilever, for its Lipton tea brand. The company switched to using slipsheets for its Assam to Dubai shipping routes two years ago and after racking up annual savings of US$100,000, hasn't looked back since.

"Not only will it save you the cost of a pallet but it will allow you to put more in a container," says Tim Drury, vice president of supply chain, Unilever North Africa and Middle East. "This allows a company to put less containers through. Once that starts to happen you are firstly reducing the environmental impact from that container movement, but you're also saving yourself 10-15% of your transport costs."

The scheme largely comes cloaked in the language of environmentalism that Unilever has adopted since it outlined a set of eco-friendly guidelines in 2002.

The regional facility in Jebel Ali Free Zone has not been excluded from this. Waste water recycled from toilets and hand-washing is used to spray the lawns. "Don't walk on the grass," jokes Drury. A building management system will be implemented to ensure that air conditioning systems and lights will cut out when the last person leaves the building at night.

Similarly, at the company's tea plantations in India, Kenya and Indonesia, sustainable agriculture initiatives have been implemented. For instance in Kenya, eucalyptus trees are planted to replace the trees that are burned in the process of transforming green tea leaves into black powder.

"For the processing of the tea we are using wood that is regrown in and around the location," says Drury. "We are the biggest buyer of black tea anywhere in the world so we have to be quite careful in how we buy the product and who we buy it from."

In order to underline the level of commitment to the environment, the company aimed to gain certification from the Rainforest Alliance for its sourcing operations for both the Lipton and PG Tips brands.

Moving away from using wooden pallets is also a part of that. The company buys 300,000 tonnes of tea - around 12% of that sold worldwide every year. Every 1.5 tonne of tea arrives on its own wooden pallet, meaning that prior to using slipsheets the company received in the region of 200,000 pallets a year.

However, many of these pallets adhere to British, rather than EU specifications, meaning that the unusual shape would make them unusable in any other industry.

 "Because they are a bit of an odd-shaped pallet, most of those can't be re-used," says Drury. "If they are not a good manufacturer they will be thrown away. If they are a good manufacturer, they will recycle it, but it is better that they did not have it in the first place."

Therefore the company began initial trials three years ago with slipsheets on its Assam to Dubai route.

"We started with one of our big Indian suppliers to bring the tea in on a large cardboard sheet. The way it works is you put the sacks on the cardboard and a special attachment on the truck picks up two bits of it, slides it onto a forklift plate and puts it into the container. When transporting tea, you are rarely restricted by weight limit. Often the only limit is volume - you can't get any more in. By dropping the pallet size down you can slide a couple more sacks on top. So if you're in a 10-stack and you fit an extra two sacks in, it means you have saved 10%.

"On 10,000 tonnes of tea that works out in the region of $100,000 we are saving. It pays for itself in months - fractions of a year."

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