Tracking emissions across our global refrigerated fleet

Across thirty countries, thousands of refrigerated vehicles keep fruit, vegetables, and fresh-cut products moving from farm to shelf, and every kilometre burns fuel that ends up in our emissions ledger. Tracking those emissions honestly is less about ambition than about methodical inventory work spread across ports, depots, and orchards that never quite line up to a single fiscal calendar. The numbers that appear in our disclosures are the product of small decisions about what to count, how to count it, and when to revise the method.

In Australia, those decisions carry extra weight. Long hauls from Cairns to Melbourne, diesel burned by reefers at the Sydney Markets, and gensets idling at Perth terminals all fall under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting scheme and the safeguard mechanism. Buyers here also expect climate disclosures aligned with ASX governance guidance, considerably more demanding than what was asked of produce companies a decade ago.

The story of how we collect the data, check it against external standards, and publish it has shifted considerably as our fleet has grown and the technology available to operators has matured.

Defining the boundary of our fleet footprint

Each December, when the Port of Brisbane hums with summer mangoes and pineapples, our sustainability team maps every refrigerated truck, container, and reefer genset across the group. Defining what counts is the unglamorous starting point. We include line-haul trucks contracted from coastal packhouses, reefers on owned vessels, gensets attached to containers at port, and the smaller utility vehicles that shuttle fruit between cold rooms and loading docks. We exclude third-party carriers who only occasionally haul our product, because we cannot reliably audit their fuel. That line in the sand matters, because understating scope is the first place investors, regulators, and retailers look when they suspect a number has been smoothed over.

We follow the operational control approach used by Climate Active and similar Australian schemes. If we set the route, schedule the driver, or own the asset, the emissions land in our inventory even if a contractor pays for the fuel. This avoids the trap of leasing vehicles to push tonnes off the books, a practice that has come under increasing pressure from ASX guidance issued in recent years.

Diesel consumption and the data behind the numbers

Diesel burned for propulsion and refrigeration is our single largest emissions source. We measure it in two independent streams: litres purchased at company-operated depots and litres logged by drivers via fuel cards at roadhouses and truck stops. The two rarely match, which is why reconciliation is a quarterly ritual. In places like Toowoomba and Wodonga, where drivers refuel on the road and paper dockets still arrive in regional offices by mail, a small reporting team chases missing data and feeds corrections back into the inventory.

We also capture electricity used at cold storage terminals in places like the Melbourne Markets and the Perth Cargo Village, where reefers are plugged in during loading windows. That grid power falls under scope 2 and is reported using the market-based method set out in the Australian National Greenhouse Accounts factors, which means tracing every terminal back to a specific retailer and state grid factor.

From manual logs to live telematics

Ten years ago, a fleet emissions report in our company was a paper exercise. Drivers wrote down odometer readings, depot staff manually added up fuel receipts, and head office produced a chart that was technically defensible but practically unverifiable. That era is behind us. Heavy vehicles in regions such as Asia and Latin America are now fitted with telematics that report fuel burn, refrigeration runtime, and idling behaviour through a satellite uplink to a central dashboard.

The transition was not cheap or quick. Where connectivity drops between regional centres, data sometimes arrives in bursts rather than real time, but the lift in accuracy has been substantial. Telematics has also exposed behaviour we used to miss: drivers running reefer units for hours at the Brisbane Markets, or gensets left running during weekend stops outside Winton in outback Queensland. Knowing about those losses is the first step towards cutting them.

Refrigerant gases and the drivers beyond the tailpipe

Tailpipe carbon dioxide gets most of the attention, but the gases that cool cargo can warm the planet far more intensely. HFCs leaking from a reefer unit have global warming potentials running into the thousands. We track refrigerant top-ups at every service event and feed the implied leak rate back into the inventory as scope 1 emissions. A unit losing half a kilo of refrigerant over a year can equate to several tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

This work is sometimes overlooked because it sits in a maintenance database rather than a fuel log. We have spent recent years pulling both datasets onto one platform so that refrigerant and combustion emissions sit side by side, in line with the GHG Protocol's scope 1 guidance and with Australian retailer requests for refrigerant data as a separate disclosure line.

At our depots in places like Lytton, workshop staff follow handling practices that limit venting, and refrigerant recovery equipment is standard at service events. We also keep records of side operations such as fleet washwater, where systems from suppliers like the Swiss Clean Water Group allow us to reduce both water and energy use at the same point in the operation.

Aligning with Australian reporting frameworks

Reporting emissions from a fleet that crosses continents does not fit neatly into one regulatory box, but Australia offers a clear anchor. The National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting scheme sets the floor for how corporations measure and disclose, and the safeguard mechanism adds a check on large emitters. Internally we treat NGER as the baseline for Australian operations and use it as a control against the global inventory.

Above that baseline, we report against the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures because Australian institutional investors expect it, and we participate in the Carbon Disclosure Project so supply chain partners can pull our data into their own reports. We also work with industry groups coordinated through Ausveg and the Australian Fresh Produce Alliance, where peers share guidance on parts of the chain that remain ambiguous.

Publishing the numbers and inviting scrutiny

Once the data is reconciled, assured, and signed off, it appears in our non-financial reporting alongside operational detail such as our investment in a closed loop cooling system for fruit processing lines. Prior-year inventories sit beside the current one so readers can see the trend rather than a single annual number, which is the only way to judge whether a fleet is genuinely decarbonising or simply shifting fuel to a contractor.

External scrutiny is part of the deal. Climate Active registered consultants, ASX analysts, and our customers all push back on assumptions, and we treat that pushback as a feature rather than a nuisance. The methodology is reviewed annually by an independent assurance firm aligned to ISAE 3410, and any restatement is flagged in the public report with the reason explained in plain English.

Across all of this reporting, the clearest message for our customers, growers, and the broader Australian community is that an honest emissions number is more useful than an impressive one. Visitors to our corporate responsibility site can trace the totals back to the methods, and our growers, logistics partners, and procurement teams refer back to those pages when they need a defensible number for their own disclosures. Credibility with the Australian market is built by making the data easy to challenge rather than easy to quote.