Through 24 to 27 March, Baxter Freight’s Sustainable Freight Network exhibited at the edie 26 Summit in the Business Design Centre, London. Having already held a stand at the edie Supply Chain Summit in 2025, we were over the moon to be involved in this year’s event.
What is edie?
As a well recognised, independent media group, edie prides itself on being a purpose-driven force in empowering sustainability, energy and environmental professionals of all levels to make business more sustainable.
Their purpose strongly aligns with our mission to help make our industry more ethical, people-orientated and planet focussed. It was therefore a great chance to talk about our own sustainability journey but also to help our customers report, reduce and remove carbon emissions within their supply chains through our Sustainable Freight Network, a commitment that was recently reflected in being a finalist at the edie 2026 Sustainability awards.
How we took steps to cut our carbon footprint on the way to edie26
Greenwashing isn’t an option for us: we’re focused on getting it right but recognise that sustainability doesn’t happen overnight; it’s the culmination of a series of small choices.
That’s why Jamie Reid (Associate Director of Accelerate UK) and I took on the challenge of delivering our Net Zero basketball arcade game to site – demonstrating real inside value mitigation (ICVM).
In place of contracting a diesel van, we took the train from Nottingham to London St Pancras and walked our oddly shaped and mysterious looking package all the way to Islington. This served as a practical demonstration of the operational awkwardness ICVM can bring, as something that is only overcome with strategic planning and enthusiastic collaboration.
Check out Tom’s account of this experience over on his LinkedIn account here.
Shared interests, sharing insights
The following two days gave us a great opportunity to meet and mutually learn from the extensive list of edie 2026 attendees. We caught up with several Heads of Sustainability (many of whom had supply chain emissions as a pending agenda item in their own corporate strategy) and were introduced to several innovative nature-based offsetting projects.
We also met many spend-based analysis providers; many facilitating nature-based carbon credit projects and many offering to act as a complete third-party solution to a company’s sustainability strategy.
What became quickly apparent however, was the prioritisation and focus on scope 1 and 2 despite the significant impact of scope 3 (and emissions stemming from logistics (categories 4 and 9) in particular).
Consistently, conversations suggested that sustainability may be seen as something businesses have to do for compliance reasons but is not yet fully embedded or championed by senior leadership teams – resulting in limited real-world collaboration between operations and sustainability leaders and a missed opportunity to address a significant share of current emissions.
Additionally, scope 3 can be considered “too difficult to measure”. However, the combination of using evidence-based data to accurately report, alongside our direct collaboration with hauliers and range of carbon insetting projects made for refreshing conversations.
Taking pride in every delivery
A personal highlight came from my session: “The Sustainable Freight Network: a three-step framework to deliver zero-emission supply chains.” Whilst this is undoubtedly a complex topic, I was proud to take it on and encourage the audience to think differently.
In this case, those in attendance held titles such as Head of Sustainability, Carbon Impact Officer and ESG Analyst, and – while I acknowledged the challenges at play – the message I shared was that there needs to be a stronger commitment to face into Scope 3 and collaborate (both internally and with the support of expert consultants where needed) to create demand and encourage adoption of more sustainable logistics solutions and infrastructure.
There has been brilliant innovation within the logistics industry in reporting, reducing and removing the impact of carbon for over a decade. The issue is that corporate sustainability strategies and accreditations are not creating the demand to pull these innovations into the marketplace. For example, the challenge of EV HGV’s being too few and too expensive would be solved if there was enough demand from shippers to make the vehicles commercially viable.
Becoming a catalyst for change
48% of UK businesses have a net zero target for 2035, and one of the main take aways of edie 26 is that the two silos of corporate sustainability and sustainable supply chains are slowly merging.
From where we’re sitting, there is a lot of work still to be done in decarbonising the largest part of every businesses’ footprint – their supply chain. The great news is that the solutions are here, ready for the taking, but strategic planning and enthusiastic collaboration are needed to realise their full potential.
Want to make meaningful progress through carbon-smart logistics?
Whether you need to meet your own targets or align with your customers’ sustainability goals, our sustainable freight experts are here to help you get your business on the path to smarter, lower carbon logistics.
