Friday, July 20, 2012

The Auto Shipping Industry - Too Hazardous To Exist?

Everyone in the modern world is discussing the environment and expressing their concerns with words such as sustainability, greening, recycling, means of ecological protection and the replacement of fossil fuels with biomass-type energy. These words are pretty much inventions of the mid 20th to 21st centuries.

Along with the horror stories of global warming, the auto shipping industry is facing serious scrutiny as an environmental hazard. It remains, though, that auto shipping is a valuable service, much in demand and is not going away soon. The industry does bear responsibility for its environmental impact and is taking a hard look at two of the major problems besetting it, those of ground waste and ecological destruction. Let's take a look at a few of the ways the industry can alleviate some of its environmental dilemmas.

Automobiles are infamous for the air pollution they cause but you don't see many people giving them up totally for a bicycle. Cars are convenient, add to our productivity and social connections while at the same time disdained like the auto shippers for their damage to the environment through toxic emissions, oil production and shipping disasters and planned obsolescence factors. The production of automobiles is material and labor intensive and distracts attention from other possibly more noble environmental causes.

The damage done to the environment by automobiles and the shipping of them is not a trivial concern. At the same time there is constant global demand for them. What's needed is to find a balance between efficient business practices and environmental issues to give people what they want without causing harm to our planet's natural resources. The major auto shippers have embraced this idea by creating better containers, robust computerized scheduling and advanced inventory management systems to help alleviate the negative impact their industry has on the environment.

The auto industry for their part has brought to the table such eco-friendly advances as hybrid and electric cars. Toyota's Prius is an early example of this, waking up the rest of the automobile manufacturers to the viability of such an endeavor. The auto shippers might look into taking some of the technology the auto industry has embraced and adapt it to their own usage or use it as a springboard toward further advances that would make sense to their industry.

We the people of the planet place untold pressures on the environment in our need for convenience, practicality and luxury. We have also been made painfully aware of how much we are damaging our world by refusing to delete the automobile from our daily lives.

What is wanted here is a united front of all of us working together to help the environment and save it from destruction. Businesses can do the same by getting together with environmental engineers to come up with new technologies and business practices that will alleviate the harm done to the planet so our descendents will continue to have a world, and hopefully, a better one.


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