In 2022 we started issuing a one-page record with orders: collection region, grade, the share of wood reused untouched versus repaired versus remilled, and what the load diverted from landfill.
We expected it to be an occasional request from customers with an ESG team. Three years later it is the single most-mentioned thing about this company in first conversations, which was not the plan.
Why it worked
Not because the document is clever. It is a page of numbers assembled from records we were already producing.
It worked because it solved a specific and widespread problem: sustainability teams being asked for pallet diversion figures and having nothing to point at except an invoice that says 'pallets'. Industry averages are not evidence, and everybody in that position knows it.
The Passport is evidence. Weights from a scale ticket, outcomes from a grading log, reconciled before the document is released. That is a different category of thing from a marketing figure and the people who need it recognise the difference immediately.
What we got wrong at first
Too many numbers. The first version had eighteen figures on it. Nobody reads eighteen figures. It now has six, plus a provenance bar, and it is considerably more useful.
Not labelling the modelled figures. Early versions mixed measured weights with modelled carbon estimates without distinguishing them. An auditor caught it, correctly, and it was a fair criticism. The document now states on its face which figures are measured and which are modelled from published averages.
Issuing it before dispatch. We used to generate the Passport when the order was picked. Reconciliation happens after dispatch, so occasionally the document and the final weights disagreed. It is now produced after the load leaves.
What customers actually use it for
- GRI 306 disclosures and corporate zero-waste reporting — the original use case and still the largest.
- Supplier scorecards. Several customers pass it straight through to their own customers as supporting evidence.
- Internal quality records. It shows grade issued against grade ordered and the repair share, which makes it a quality document as much as an environmental one. This was not anticipated at all.
- Tender responses. Increasingly, procurement processes ask for evidence rather than commitments, and this is evidence.
The number that surprised us
Roughly 62% of the passports we issue go to customers who never asked for one. Programme customers receive them automatically, and a meaningful proportion of those had no sustainability reporting requirement when the arrangement started.
Several of them subsequently developed one, and having three years of documentation already sitting in a folder turned a difficult project into a straightforward one. That is a better argument for issuing it by default than anything we could have reasoned out in advance.
Where it goes next
The obvious extension is per-unit rather than per-load traceability, and we have looked at it twice and declined twice. Marking every pallet with a scannable identity is technically feasible and the cost per unit is not trivial at 1.6 million units a year.
More importantly, we are not convinced it would tell anyone anything they need. A load-level record answers the questions people actually ask. A unit-level record answers questions nobody has asked us in three years.
So for now it stays as it is: one page, six numbers, and every one of them traceable to a weight.