We’re excited to announce the first 3PL we are investing in through the Igniterate Social Impact Fund, Manifest Commerce.

Problem the company is addressing:

The dirty secret in eCommerce is the considerable negative impact shipping products to consumers has on the environment. Packaging and Transportation are two of the largest contributors to Global warming with discarded packaging filling landfills with non-degradable materials, and the Transportation industry is the largest contributor to Greenhouse gasses (GHG).

As brands make an effort for their business to become more sustainable one of the greatest GHG sources of their business is their fulfillment and delivery operations.

Solution:

Manifest Commerce is launching the first Sustainable 3PL (3rd Party Logistics) company, taking the classic fulfillment center concept and turning the major components green through:

• 100% Recyclable Packaging (Zero plastics)
• Sustainable Energy Sources for Warehouses
• Optimized Fulfillment Routing to reduce carbon emissions
• Carbon Offsets covering everything else

Why We Invested:

If we are going to tackle our GHG emission problem there’s only so much each individual brand can do to optimize its processes. Turning your product carbon-neutral to negative is an amazing accomplishment, but we aren’t going to tackle our environmental crisis by addressing operations.

When the Igniterate team learned about George’s vision to build a sustainable 3PL network we knew this was the type of opportunity that would help brands make a considerable leap toward becoming more environmentally sustainable.

Impact:

There are two major levers of Sustainable impact that we expect this investment to make.

First, reduce the packaging that ends up in landfills. Utilizing sustainable, recycled packaging, that degrades even if it ends up in a landfill, will have a major impact on reducing the amount of waste that is contributed by eCommerce consumers every year, as the friction is removed for brands to adopt sustainable packaging without thinking about it or incurring new sourcing costs.

Second, the reduction in fossil fuel energy consumption through sustainably sourced energy to power all of the warehouses and optimized fulfillment routes will reduce the eCommerce industry's, and greater economy’s, dependence on fossil fuels. Optimizing flight and trucking routes will drive operational efficiencies by saving on the amount of gas/oil we need to move products through the supply chain, reducing our emissions, and adding dollars back to businesses' bottom lines.

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