Kwik-Fit Fleet Awarded for Focus on Vehicle Mileage Reduction

Kwik-Fit Fleet has provided a wide range of fast-fit services to the Legal & General company car fleet for more than a decade, and recently the fast-fitter was selected from a number of competing Legal & General suppliers to win the company’s 2009 Supply Chain ‘Make a Difference’ (MAD) Awards. Legal & General also donated £1,000 to Kwik-Fit Fleet’s nominated charity, Rays of Sunshine, which grants wishes to children in the UK between the ages of three and 18 who are living with serious or life-threatening illnesses.

The Legal & General awards recognise suppliers who have made a significant improvement in their environmental or other corporate social responsibility impacts. This includes employee relations and community involvement. Kwik-Fit Fleet reports its receipt of the 2009 stems from its significantly increased environmental focus following the summer 2008 opening of its National Distribution Centre in Corby, Northamptonshire. While the £10 million, 245,000 square feet complex – the size of 10 football pitches – is a tyre distribution centre, it is also the hub of a vehicle parts recycling and logistics operation that is focused on reducing vehicle mileage.

The benefits of the centre, Kwik-Fit Fleet notes, include:

· A process of  ‘reverse logistics’ is utilised which means that the 69-vehicle truck fleet – having delivered tyres to five distribution hubs across the UK or the centres – returns, reloaded, with worn out tyres, removed tyre casings and scrap catalytic converters and other waste material. The industry first ‘one-for-one exchange’ results in trucks travelling fully loaded thus saving up to three million miles a year and an estimated 3,000 tonnes of carbon in reduced emissions.

· Once back at the National Distribution Centre a specially installed machine shreds more than six million tyres a year removed from company and privately-owned cars and vans.

· Following shredding, the rubber is transported from the site for use in artificial sports and equestrian surfaces, in children’s playground surfaces, as a fuel in the cement industry, replacing aggregate as landfill engineering, and in the manufacturing of portable rail crossing and carpet underlay.

· In addition to tyres, some 40,000+ tons of tyre casings are remoulded and others are also shredded or crumbed. The steel cord in casings is extracted and re-used in steel making.

· Other material recycled includes around 1.5 million exhausts, thousands of batteries, almost 500,000 litres of waste oil and thousands of litres of anti-freeze are sent to specialist chemical extraction processors.

“We are delighted that Kwik Fit Fleet has won the Supply Chain Making a Difference Awards for 2009,” Graham Precey, head of CSR at Legal & General, said. “The annual awards are designed to award suppliers for their positive impact upon the environment and society. It’s important that as a large FTSE50 company we cooperate with our suppliers to improve standards of operation for our own clients.

“Kwik-Fit Fleet was chosen as the winner on the basis of its commitment to the environment,” Precey added. “The judges recognised the significant benefits realised from the company’s initiative in creating a National Distribution Centre as well as its tangible achievement in tyre recycling.”

Kwik-Fit Fleet was voted the winner by a judging panel that included Mr. Precey, Richard Beer, director Central Finance and Group Purchasing, and representatives from Business in the Community and the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply. It is the second award Kwik-Fit Fleet has won for its ‘green; focus it also was secured the Environment Award in the 2009 Van Fleet World Honours. Furthermore, the company was also runner-up in the Chartered Institute of Logistics Awards for Excellence 2009 (Environmental Improvement).

“Kwik-Fit Fleet has taken responsibility on behalf of the fleet industry to not only deliver new parts in an environmentally efficient manner, but to dispose of waste in a ‘green’ way,” commented Mike Wise, dead of Kwik-Fit Fleet. “We are frequently asked by our business customers to demonstrate our corporate social responsibility and external recognition such as this award from an ethical trading organisation like Legal & General is fantastic.

“The strategies that we are pursuing with parts recycling and the establishment of our National Distribution Centre deliver multiple benefits and efficiencies that assist Kwik-Fit Fleet, our customers and Britain,” Wise added.