This guidance is for the Positive Planet - Distribution Data Collection. It covers the data collection process for upstream distribution (from suppliers) and downstream distribution (to customers).
Distribution
The ideal data for this section is the distance travelled for each delivery, broken out in to each leg of the journey. For example if you are based in London and made three orders from a company in China we would be able to calculate that the total distance travelled would be approximately 23,505km and that there are 3 legs to the journey ie. Overseas road, sea / air and finally UK road.
Upstream (from suppliers):
This is deliveries and couriered items from a supplier to any of your sites or locations.
You will need to input the address of your supplier followed by the address the parcel was sent to. For UK deliveries you may input post code. For international orders we prefer city but can work with country if this is all that is available albeit this low quality data and will lead to a less accurate measurement.
Downstream (to customers):
This is deliveries from you to any of your clients, including orders you make on behalf of any third parties. We will need the origin address (likely your business) and the address the parcel was delivered to.
Where deliveries are made overseas we will also need to know if this was via sea or air.
Complex Data:
If you are unable to collect this information from the data you currently have, we have a few estimation options. Feel free to book in a brief call with one of the team if you would like to discuss any of the following further.
Where deliveries are recorded on large quantities of separate files / invoices we can take a sample and scale up to gain insight into the potential emissions and materiality compared to your organisational footprint.
If you distribute frequently to/from one place we can create a 'typical journey' one of your deliveries may take and then assume that all journey’s behave in this same way.
If no other data is available we can look to record financial spend, however this will impact the quality and accuracy of your measurement.