Hanesbrands has reduced movements of goods between our manufacturing and distribution facilities around the world, and we give preference to transportation methods that have the lowest environmental impact. These initiatives reduce our carbon footprint and save money. The CO2 emissions from our transportation and logistics fell by 41 percent from 2008 to 2009, and spending on transportation and logistics declined 37 percent during 2009.

Beginning in 2007, we organized our facilities into three geographic clusters: the Caribbean, Central America, and East Asia. Each cluster includes a textile facility and cutting and sewing facilities. By focusing on moving goods within the clusters and optimizing movements between clusters, we lowered our number of land shipments by more than 30 percent.

  • The geographic clusters allow us to create a highly efficient transportation program that reduces the total miles that our goods must be shipped and also significantly reduces the number of empty miles – those generated when trucks return empty after dropping off a shipment. In the Americas, for instance, southbound freight containers carry yarn to textile facilities in Central America and the Caribbean, where the same containers are loaded with cut parts to be sent to nearby sewing facilities. These containers are then filled with finished goods and sent north to our U.S. distribution network.

We use our asset management system to track shipments, improve our utilization of freight containers, and optimize routing of shipping.

  • We now enforce strict requirements for loading containers so that we ship larger volumes in fewer trips. We improved global container utilization from 80 percent in 2008 to 87 percent in 2009, which is the equivalent of using 2,000 fewer containers. This superior asset utilization lowered our transportation spending by more than $4 million. Our goal for 2010 is 90 percent container utilization.
  • We eliminated further unnecessary movements of containers in 2009 by unloading them upon entry to the United States and optimizing the transfer of goods to our distribution centers. Individual trucks formerly traveled to each of our distribution centers in succession. Today, we load trucks to deliver to a single distribution center. This change lowered our trucking moves by 25 percent, saving us approximately $240,000 for the year.

We began a mode-switching program in early 2009 to greatly reduce the use of truck and air freight in favor of rail and ocean shipments which have a much lower environmental impact. Ocean shipments produce less than 2 percent as much CO2 (for a given distance and volume shipped) as air freight. After ocean shipping, rail transfers are the next most environmentally friendly means of transportation, followed by trucking and air.

  • Today, 75 percent of our product movements formerly made by truck now use rail, compared to almost no rail transfers in 2007. This change alone has saved approximately $3 million since its inception. By looking for mode-switching opportunities, we eliminated 16 million truck miles from 2008 to 2009, equating to a 49 percent reduction in CO2 emissions from trucking.
  • When shipping our apparel products into the United States, our largest market, only 1 percent of our product volume is now transported by air, while 98 percent goes via ocean shipping.