Saurabh Aggarwal Discusses Green Warehousing in Saur Energy

Importance of green warehousing in India

Saurabh Aggarwal, Head- Taxation & Logistics, Navitas Solar

Nowadays, everything is becoming sustainable, be it products, companies, services or supply chains! Awareness and social responsibility are overall increased amongst the stakeholders about nature, everyone wants to go with environment-friendly solutions. Sustainable supply chains have emerged as a new corporate goal. Companies have started to measure the social and environmental impact of their actions, products, and services.

With the tremendous growth of the E-Commerce industry and D2C Businesses in the last decade, the demand for warehousing in India has flourished exponentially. With time, warehousing seems to be expanding only. However, there is a need for Green Warehousing. Warehouses are a significant source of emission of GHG gases and with the same, the carbon footprint increases of the supply chain. The emissions are generated by heating, cooling, and lighting mostly and sometimes by the excess usage of paper and wastage of excess inventories.

With the growth of warehousing in India, the need for environment-friendly warehousing has also increased over the time. Hence, with incremental growth in the sector, warehouses are encouraged to take enough steps towards green warehousing.

In Green Warehousing, practices of reducing carbon emissions are implemented like reducing power consumption by generating electricity through solar power plants and reducing carbon footprint and greenhouse gases by optimizing processes and practices. It also involves implementing systems, tools, and devices to make warehouses green. Technological advancement also helps in green warehousing because overdependence on managerial practices causes pressure on human resources.

There are some ideas to make green warehouses:

Reducing power consumption

Warehouses can use electricity generated by solar power plants instead of using electricity generated by the thermal power plant. Solar energy is the cleanest energy among all the renewables and its biggest advantage is it requires less maintenance. Warehouses can install the solar power plant at their rooftop or can install solar power plants for a captive generation or can use solar power by open access. Most of the warehouses have broad and flat roofs which is ideal for installing rooftop solar power plants. India is a lucky country having 300 sunny days in a year which makes it ideal for warehouses to choose solar. Warehouses with solar and storage can also work efficiently in some remote places where transmission and distribution networks can not reach.

Warehouses can replace conventional lighting by LED which can reduce electricity consumption. It can also implement efficient heating & cooling systems. Also, energy efficient equipment can also reduce the overall power consumption in the long run. Designing the warehouse in such a way that it can maximize the use of daylight can be also beneficial. Sensor based lighting systems can also save some energy.

Operation without Papers

Another approach to improved supply chain sustainability is by reducing the usage of paper in the warehouse. The digital transformation in the country has already taken over many paper works. Still, some papers are essential in warehouses. With paperless warehouse management, efficiency of warehouse can be increased. Warehouses must adapt digital practices like order picking, barcoding, and radio frequency identification (RFID) to reduce paper consumption to a significant extent. With the time, paper usage in the warehouses will surely reduce.

Warehouse Management System (WMS)

Warehouse management system (WMS) coordinates digitally with retail, shipping and transportation systems. Green warehouse optimizes the stock inventory, minimizes the unnecessary inventory and also optimizes the available storage space.

Today, consumers are aware of the environmental impact of the products they are using. They are also conscious of the ESG impact or carbon footprint of the company. Everyone prefers eco-friendly products. The prominent emission for any organization’s carbon footprint is because of the supply chain, so switching to sustainable supply chains can reduce a company’s emissions to a large extent.

Green Warehousing can help logisticians in reducing energy consumption, reduce loss of resources and reduce deadstock. Therefore, green warehousing can be a necessity in recent times. At, Navitas Solar, a leading module manufacturing company, by providing Solar EPC services, we help consumers to install solar at their premises. We, ourselves have installed a 273-kW solar power plant at our factory rooftop.