EP 579: The Journey to Sustainable Warehousing, Insights from ProMat 2025
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This podcast was a live panel discussion moderated by myself, Kevin, at ProMat 2025 featuring panelists from Nucor, DJJ, and Big Joe. I hope you enjoy this discussion on sustainability in the warehouse. The New Warehouse Podcast hosted by Kevin Lawton is your source for insights and ideas from the distribution, transportation, and logistics industry.

A new episode every Monday morning brings you the latest from industry experts and thought leaders. And now, here's Kevin. All right, here we go. Welcome in, everybody, to our panel kicking off here in the sustainability and transportation field.

Today's panel, starting right now, is entitled The Journey to a Sustainable Warehouse, Goals and Practices to Achieve Sustainability. So we're going to be diving into some different aspects of how a couple companies here that are joining us on this panel are.

are looking at sustainability and how they're helping bring that sustainability aspect to the warehouse itself. I'm going to be your moderator today. I'm Kevin Lawton. I'm founder and host of the New Warehouse podcast, where we talk about all things warehousing, right? But the stars of this panel are right here, sitting in the chairs, right? Stars, yeah.

That's why they get chairs, because they're the stars today, right? So we're going to be joined by Luke Johnson, here's Sustainability Supervisor at Nucor. Daniel Aguirre, who is Commercial Director at Nucor. Marty Boyd, who is the CMO at Big Joe. And also David Hartman.

who is a marketing manager at DJJ. So they're going to talk to us about how are they looking at sustainability within the warehouse and how you can bring that into your operations and your business to be able to do that. So we're going to kick it off here with a question for everybody. We're going to learn a little bit more about what they do specifically and how they approach sustainability. So the perception of sustainability in material handling is relatively new, but obviously a hot topic.

And there's a lot of different aspects to that, a lot of different angles to that. So we're going to kick it off with our panel here and hear from them how each one of their companies is approaching sustainability, both from internal perspective and also as it reaches down to their customers as well who they serve. So we're going to kick this one off with Luke today.

All right. As Kevin said, I'm Luke Johnson. I work for Nucor on their corporate sustainability team based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. I am also a recovering structural engineer. I did that for about 15 years before I moved over kind of specifically to the steel and sustainability space. Real high level, I'll talk about more Nucor from an enterprise-wide level. For those who aren't familiar, there are two predominant ways that steel is made within the world.

The first method is through a blast furnace. When most of you probably close your eyes and think of a steel mill, that's probably what you're envisioning in your mind, a very smokestack-intensive industry, a lot of virgin materials, fossil fuel-intensive sort of industry that that is.

Then there's the EAF or electric arc furnace method of making steel. What that does is it uses existing steel or scrap that we take in and we melt that with electricity. Nucor owns and operates 25 mills in addition to many other downstream product groups.

All 25 of our mills utilize that EAF technology to make steel. One reason that's very important is that blast furnace steel method of making steel has about three times the greenhouse gas intensity that of EAF steelmaking. So we're already coming to the table at a very advantaged position when we're talking about sustainability and steelmaking.

In addition to that, we'll get into a few questions later, but we very much value transparency at Nucor. So we do things like EPDs, corporate sustainability reports, all those sorts of things. And then lastly, we are a founding member of the Global Steel Climate Council. That is a glide path to get to net zero by 2050. So Nucor has a 2050 net zero goal as well as an interim goal by 2030. So with that, I will pass it on to Daniel.

Thank you, Luke. And as Kevin mentioned, my name is Daniel Geary. I'm the commercial director focused on our warehouse division. First and foremost, it's an honor to be up here with these panelists. I learned something new with these experts. And we all got to take time because this is a really cool guy to give Kevin a round of applause. It's always a good time with Kevin.

Thank you. Thank you. And I'll keep it brief because we'll dive into the details as we go through this panel. When it comes from the warehouse side of it, we focus what this whole industry is focused on. How do we deliver a product most efficiently and close to our customers while keeping sustainability in the forefront?

And we do that through innovation, automation, and product lifecycle. So internally, we focus on that, and we help our existing customers and future partners of how do they reach their sustainability goals. And we'll get into the details, as I mentioned, through the panel to understand what are the steps to do that. With that, I'll pass it over to Marty. Thank you.

Yeah, hi. My name is Martin Boyd. I am the Chief Marketing Officer with Big Joe Forklifts. So I am not a steel guy like these gentlemen here. But I am at heart. We use steel on our products. I'm Chief Marketing Officer at Big Joe. I am based in Portland, Oregon. I'm a long-term industry guy. I've been in the forklift industry ever since I was about this big about 33 years ago. So I'm

Working now for Big Joe for several months, one of the things that attract me about Big Joe and what we're aspiring to do is to really change the way the market thinks about sit-down counterbalance internal forklifts, internal combustion forklifts.

If you go back in history, if you look at the use of forklifts in the marketplace, if you go back to like 1984, that's when the market, overall forklifts, this is every class of forklift you have, the market at that time was 50-50. So 50% of sales were internal combustion and 50% of the sales were electric. And if you move that forward, everybody's been talking about the electrification of the market. But if you really look at it, it has been really moving at a snail's pace.

When you drive into it and you strip out a lot of the products that are used in warehouses, which is primary electric anyway, using lead-acid batteries, you'll see that the sit-down counterbalance market, so you have electric batteries that are powering sit-down counterbalance, and you have internal combustion, which we call Class 4 and Class 5, there really hasn't been that much movement over the years towards electric. Only until recently are we starting to see that movement increase.

move away from internal combustion like your propanes and your diesel and moving over to the electric side and what's making the difference is lithium so big joe we are our aspiration is to be the leadership in electrification our primary goal is to move companies and customers that have been using

primarily internal combustion products like propane, especially in the indoor environments, the indoor warehouse environments, and offer them a solution that will allow them to move from internal combustion to electric. So that's our primary goal, and we can probably dive into more of the details as we move forward. But thank you for your time.

Thank you, gentlemen. As was mentioned earlier, my name is David Hoder. I work for DJJ, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nucor. We were acquired in 2008. I've been with DJJ for coming up on 20 years now. DJJ was actually founded in

Back in the late 1800s as a trading company, and we kind of attached ourselves at the hip to Nucor back in the 70s and have grown with Nucor over the years. And our primary mission is the sourcing and trading of recyclable content as well as the processing of recyclable content for steel mills as well as non-ferrous companies. So we trade probably 20 million tons of material a year. We source from all across the United States.

And again, the focus on that is finding lowest cost logistic cost for where this material is sourced from and where it goes to. And that sometimes means closed loop recycling. And sometimes that means open loop recycling, where we find the most freight logical homes for materials. While sustainability is, I would say, a recent arrival to the party, DJJ has been focusing on sustainability since the late 1800s. And just very happy to be here today with you all.

Absolutely. So let's hear a quick hand for our panelists here. I'm going to throw it back at you, Dan. All right, there we go. So we have a lot of experience here, definitely, from the 1800s, right? And from when Marty was just a little boy on a forklift, right? So definitely bringing that to the table. And we see, though, that at the root of a lot of what's going on here is some steel, right? So for New Corps' perspective, right? So if we take a look at

you know steel manufacturing which Luke mentioned a little bit there briefly you know if we take a step back and we look at steel manufacturing obviously that's been around for a very long time but Luke kind of tell us you know what does like modern steel making look like and how does that kind of help to reduce the environmental impact that maybe we've seen in the past

Yeah, sure. So just want to reinforce kind of what I said earlier, kind of focusing on EAF steelmaking specifically. So people sometimes have the tendency to think that to fully decarbonize steel, we'll have to come up with a third methodology for making steel.

Truly, EAF steelmaking is that technology that we need to decarbonize. We just need to decarbonize kind of the energy inputs into the system. So think of things like electricity, natural gas, those sorts of things. And then any sort of inbound material that we're bringing in, how do we help decarbonize those upstream activities?

So I just want to kind of lay the groundwork for that there first as far as the technology that exists is the technology of the future that we think can truly decarbonize within the steel industry. In addition to that, steel does have very high recycled content when you do make it with EAF technology.

So Nucor across our entire steelmaking division, our recycled content was 77%. That is for 2023 production. I do know the 2024 number, but we haven't fully released that letter yet. So it's very close to that. It's maybe about...

higher, but not officially. So we're still around that 77%, which we're very proud of. So again, a truly recyclable material. And I think David will speak to that a little bit in more detail. As far as decarbonizing, I did mention kind of those energy inputs.

and the materials that come into that. And I think we have a question later that we'll dive into that a little bit deeper, so I won't go too much into detail there. But I did want to mention one of our newest steel mills in Lexington, North Carolina, that will fully come online in about three months. We're deploying a lot of great technology there. So I think, again, people think that the steel industry is kind of your grandfather's industry. There's not a lot of tech and innovation. That mill will have about nine robots within it.

So that is going to kind of remove teammates from certain areas of the mill. It will help automate that process. It will make that process much more efficient. In addition, we have some technology, as I mentioned earlier, we utilize electricity to melt that scrap. So they have a bunch of AI technology that will kind of monitor that energy intensity of

and help make that process even more efficient. So how can we deliver that electricity in a more cost-effective way, make it more efficient, and therefore reduce the greenhouse gases that are associated with that energy usage into the system? As our scope two, which is electricity usage,

That can be anywhere from like 25 to 30 percent of our carbon intensity for steelmaking. So it's still a relatively high percentage of that steelmaking number. And we want to work to kind of bring that number down as much as we can. So that's just kind of some things that are happening in the steelmaking sector today. Very interesting there. And obviously a lot going into that steelmaking. But you mentioned the recyclability there. So David, do you want to chime in there a little bit? What does recyclability look like with modern steelmaking?

So, as has been mentioned, steel is endlessly recyclable, which makes it somewhat unique in some of these contexts because some other end products require virgin material. You can continue to make steel out of steel for a long time. One of the things that

DJJ strives to do is to find freight logical homes that is in and of itself maybe technology light but people intensive to make sure that we're sending steel to the right scrap to the right places and minimizing carbon footprint as it relates to logistic expense. And then in terms of sortation and processing, and I think we touch on this a little bit later maybe, but there's been a tremendous amount of investment not only in the EAF space in general but also in the scrap processing and sortation space.

So in the terms of ferrous scrap, that looks like something called ballistic separation to further refine scrap and make it usable for high-quality input. And then on the non-ferrous space, we have three-dimensional separation, which is water-density based and allows us to extract...

much more content that would otherwise be landfilled for non-ferrous aluminum and copper specifically. So tremendous amount of large-scale technology as well as automation in that space. And it takes what I think on the surface for most people looks like a very patently uninteresting topic and turns it into a very technology investment-driven industry.

Yeah, and to build off of that, I'd recommend if you guys have time to Google, find a YouTube video of EAF and just really watch it. And then it would be great if you do have time to come to one of our facilities because seeing it in person while you fuel that electricity, it totally changes the whole perspective of when you talk about sustainability and when you talk about steelmaking. And to Luke's point of 77% recycled content.

So just, we'll share some content, but it definitely paints the picture, rather than us just talking about it, of how large that process is. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's really incredible to hear how much recyclability is actually in that steel, right? And I think, you know, we probably don't realize that

some of that racking that we have maybe was something else before, right? Or maybe it was older racking, right? And so as we look at our facilities and we have a lot of structural things that happen within the facility, racking being one of them, for example, but a lot of other different things too as well. But how do we consider sustainability and how do we incorporate that into whether it's a new building or an existing building as we start to retrofit new solutions?

So Daniel, you want to kick that off? How do we look at that from that perspective and how do we incorporate that into our structural design? Yes, most definitely. So first and foremost, the biggest challenge that we see with our customers is understanding their growth, whether it's growth in a certain region or growth of their products and SKU changes. So how do you incorporate that within your design, your engineering of your really distribution center from the core and shell all the way down to how you're going to pick and ship that product?

So looking at the corn shell first, understanding if you want a conventional build, a pre-engineered metal building, or a rack-supported ASRS. And it's very challenging to decide that up front, but you really have to sit down with the experts and understanding your growth. Within that, how do you incorporate sustainability? You think about how is that material being sourced?

Is it being sourced from EAF technology or is it being sourced from BOF? And that is going to be the true sustainability impact to your overall core and shell of the building. Going internally, to your point, Kevin, there's a lot going on internally. Whether it's the racking system, protective guarding, conveyor,

Lift trucks, many, many, many things. So we try to really simplify the process with our customers. First and foremost, talking about the design, the engineering behind it. How do we leverage automation and technology? And talking about growth.

but to Luke's point earlier, being very transparent and you do that with environmental product decorations. So having that in the forefront of having the conversation of where your materials being sourced and how close you are to the distribution center is going to really make the biggest impact. When we talk about retrofitting, I mean we're here today and all we see here is automation

A lot of our customers are going from standard pallet racking type picking to more automation. What we can help with is full product lifecycle. So we'll go into a facility, look at the old racking system, partner with our GJJ down there, and we'll take that old scrap, melt it down, get with Luke to make new product, new raw material for us, and deliver that finished good. So hopefully Marty can then pick the product that you guys need.

So with that, I'll pass it over to Marty to talk more about inside the facility as well. Yeah, thanks for the...

The tee up, too. Appreciate that. So there's one thing to really understand in the industrial lift truck market that's happening now. There's primarily two trends that are happening in the marketplace. One is typically in a warehouse environment, you have lead-acid batteries that are operating lift trucks. So that's what you primarily see in a warehouse environment. There are instances where you will see some internal combustion-type products, usually a cushion tire, indoor-type product, you know, either running propane,

You won't see diesel on a cushion tire truck, but you'll also see gasoline as well or dual fuel trucks. So there's this whole movement from... The first trend is moving from lead-acid battery technology to lithium technology because there's a lot of significant efficiencies that can be gained and a lot of costs that can be benefited from moving from lead-acid technology to lithium. And then you got the second one, which isn't so prevalent in the warehouse environment, but...

You know, there are still internal combustion trucks that are operated indoors, and we're trying to make that an inconceivable notion of operating a lift truck indoors.

So to make that movement, whether it's lead acid to lithium or internal combustion to lithium, the importance of understanding the layout, like the layout of your warehouse, whether it's a refurbished warehouse or whether it's a new warehouse that's being built up from bottom up, there's a lot more questions you have to ask. It's not like just buying a propane-powered forklift where I order it with a bunch of options. I plug it in.

I place the order into the factory. They build the truck. When the truck comes in, I give the keys to the operator, and he's off and running. There's a lot more work that has to happen on the front end, which is, number one, I have to make sure that the infrastructure, the electrical infrastructure, has enough power to power the chargers that are going to power the forklifts.

I have to plan where I'm going to place the chargers. I want to make sure the chargers are placed in locations where when the operators go on shift changes or breaks, that they automatically go up to the charger and plug it in and always fast fill the charge. We always say top off the tank as much as you can. So there's a lot of considerations that you need to learn and really taking those points into the whole layout of a new facility, whether it's a new facility or whether it's a refurbished older facility.

Yeah, great points there. And I think very insightful, too, because you have to think about, you know, not only just, you know, sustainability, like how do I eliminate paper in my warehouse? Right. It goes much deeper, I think, as we can see from what everybody's sharing here, you know, all the way down to the core of that steel that you're utilizing. Right. And how is it manufactured? How is it sourced? Is it coming from recycled materials to begin with? And then how do we set up our infrastructure to be able to support something like lithium ion technology?

There's a lot to think about there as either you're retrofitting or looking at a greenfield project to be able to do that, right? So now, considering those factors, when we look at what's going on in the material handling sector right now, I mean, we're going to have, how many people are going to attend this this week? 50,000, 60,000 or something, I think I heard, and

I'm sure every one of them has some kind of challenge or pain point, right? So we got like 50,000 problems walking through the door here this week, potentially, right? But if we look at pain points right now, especially around sustainability, we have companies that are implementing sustainability goals, or maybe there's some government push for certain things. So David, I'm curious from your perspective,

How do you see people in the material handling industry, how are they shifting things? How are they being able to kind of meet some of these goals or start to implement solutions to be able to meet some of these goals? So I think I'll start with, if I zoom out for a moment and just talk about the recycled content industry to begin with. The U.S. is about a 60 to 90 million ton industry.

steel recycled market per year, and 8 to 10 million tons of that is pre-consumer, the rest is post-consumer. So in the example that Daniel brought up, you know, of recycling, racking, and turning it back into steel, that on the surface seems like a very easy problem to solve. And they're, you know, recycling is a very regional market. So you could drive down the street here in Chicago, or maybe in the outskirts of Chicago, and find

of people who would be willing and happy to take your scrap for you. However, if you're looking to scale that activity and work with an organization that's both professional, can manage your logistics, has advanced sortation technology, and is offering you visibility to where your material is, where it's going, how it's priced,

Those sorts of things. One of the challenges is that it's a very diffuse industry on the scrap recycling side of the equation. There are literally thousands of sources of scrap and recyclers in the United States.

And I think the challenge is if you are looking to really get serious about your sustainability journey, you need to partner with someone who has the ability to do more than just pick up your scrap and pay you for it. They need to be able to manage logistics. They need to be able to provide you visibility. And in some cases, they even need to be able to show you the ability to go closed loop or show you where your material is going so that you can better understand your carbon footprint and sustainability as it relates to your particular scrap.

And I think that's a great point because it's more than just, you know, get rid of this scrap that I have. Right. Like, where is that scrap going to go? How can I maybe bring that scrap back to life in some other forms and be able to do that? And that's a lot of what you're talking about here, doing with the recyclability and then turning it into future products.

projects and being able to do that as well. So along those same lines, there's a lot of goals around emissions too and reducing that carbon footprint. So Marty, we'll toss it over to you and talk to us a little bit about from your perspective how you're helping to enable people to accomplish those goals.

Yeah, one of the biggest challenges we see in moving from an internal combustion to an electric type platform, whether that's lead acid or lithium, is really just awareness. Now, there's been many companies that have tried to move away from internal combustion type forklifts and move over to electric in the past.

and they've had bad experiences. There's a lot of pains related to managing a fleet of forklifts with lead acid batteries. You've got usually multiple lead acid batteries per truck. So, all right, I have to change those batteries. I have to water those batteries. I have to charge them. They have to cool down. So there's a lot of pains associated with that. And many of those customers that have tried to

to go from propane or diesel to an electric platform using lead acid, go right back because the pains are too much. I would rather just operate a forklift indoors with an internal combustion engine. Today, because of the technology with lithium ion really coming in and displacing lead acid because there's so many value attributes to lithium ion versus a lead acid solution,

Really, it's awareness. It's getting the word out on the street that, yes, you may have tried to move from an internal combustion to electric before, and we understand the pains you felt from going to lead acid, but what if I was to offer you a solution that guaranteed that we could resolve all of those lead acid battery pains with a lithium-ion solution? That is something that is definitely starting to take momentum in the marketplace. We're finally starting to see...

somewhat of an acceleration behind movement from sit-down counterbalance product, you know, operating with internal combustion engines, over to electric. And lithium has a huge part to that. And that's one of the things that we're doing at Big Joe is really the technology is there. It's just how do you get the awareness out to the dealers and how do you get the awareness out to the customers to get them to understand there is a solution there and it may not be as expensive as you think.

So really, awareness is our biggest challenge, and that's one of the reasons why we're putting a very big presence here at the ProMat this year with our new line of lithium products. Yeah, absolutely. And hopefully we're making some people aware here, too, during this panel, right? I mean, that's the goal. So, you know, looking at these things, I mean, there's a lot of...

thinking, right? There's a lot of analysis, a lot of details behind the scenes that kind of go into some of these sustainability initiatives, right? As we've kind of heard here, right? If you think about like some of the things that Daniel or Luke talking about on the steel side, you know, you don't necessarily look at steel and

and think about all these things. I mean, I'm sure you guys do, definitely, right? But the average person or the average operator may be not thinking about those things. But there's a lot of innovation that's happening behind the scenes there too, which you touched on a little bit, looking at some of the AI or some robotics in there. So tell us a little bit about

how your companies are utilizing technology to kind of help move sustainability forward, not only for yourselves internally, but then also for the customer at the end of the day. So, Dano, you want to kick that off? Yeah, I'll kick it off from the warehouse level, and then I'll pass it to Luke from an enterprise level. But what we focus on is what we talked about earlier. How do we leverage technology to deliver a design-engineered, efficient product to our customers?

Our strategy was to be strategically located in the largest distribution centers in our country, whether it's the Southeast, Texas, or California, to deliver that efficient, sustainable product. So we're looking at automation in all of our facilities while connecting it with our scheduling to ensure we are fully efficient to lower our scrap and making sure we manage our scrap to the scrapyard so it does become an EAF finished good again.

Additionally to that, we innovated a product called Tubrack. Tubrack behind it was initially for high seismic activity, but it evolved from there. When you talk about damage and replacement, that is a huge portion of our business. You see it here where certain drivers or people working within the facility are damaging product. So Tubrack...

we innovated just one part of the actual racking or one piece can be replaced. So we are lowering that replacement and keeping sustainability in our mind while we do that. But if we do have to replace it, as I mentioned before, we scrap it. From an enterprise level, I know we're working on multiple different technologies to move sustainability forward. So Luke could fill you in on that. All right.

So as I mentioned earlier, too, there's two predominant ways you can decarbonize the way in which we make steel. That's through energy and those inbound materials. And I'll give you a few examples of each of those that Nucor is either currently deploying or that we're actively looking at. And I'll start with the material space first. We have a facility located in southern Louisiana. We have partnered with ExxonMobil to install a carbon capture system that will come fully online probably in about a year and a half from now, summer of 2026.

That is estimated to capture anywhere from 600 to 800,000 metric tons of CO2 per year. That facility is more upstream in our steelmaking process.

The benefit there is that that then can decarbonize our steelmaking sector, as well as any downstream products, being warehouse systems is one of them, that utilizes that sheet product to make a lot of their end user things that go into many of your buildings out there. That's one example of that. In addition, I won't get too much into steelmaking 101, but I don't know if you all have heard of pig iron before. Pig iron is taking kind of virgin ore material, and that is refined through using coal.

Green pig iron utilizes that same process, but instead of using coal or mined material, you're going to make a biochar product by using things like eucalyptus, which is a much faster growing and more renewable source of that base material. And then you can also utilize renewable energy to make that charcoal product that goes into making that green pig iron. Green pig iron has about the third of the carbon intensity of traditional pig iron.

Nucor has been using that for about the last year, year and a half, and we're continuing to utilize that in many of our steel mills and looking to grow that as well as that can be a big factor into decarbonizing in our steelmaking sector. Switching over to the energy side, Nucor currently has invested in two renewable projects. Those are through things called Virtual Purchase Power Agreements, or VPPAs.

I'm doing my best not to speak in acronyms because sustainability people do that a lot. We also are investing in a third. That will be a hydroelectric project, and that comes online next year. So through that, we can kind of help invest in those projects long term.

In addition, we procure the RECs from those projects or renewable energy credits. And we can kind of utilize those to help decarbonize certain sectors or even certain products for our customers that kind of value that sustainability supply chain. And then lastly, I will mention SMRs or small modular reactors. Nucor has kind of provided funding to two companies, NuScale and Helion. We do believe that we want an emission-free source of power into the future, right?

But we do believe that nuclear plays a role in that. So you hear a lot about renewable energy through solar, wind, hydro, all those sorts of things. But we also believe that for us to fully decarbonize, we kind of need that baseline source of reliable power. And we think that kind of that SMR and nuclear technology can help provide that. And then you have kind of your renewable projects that help supplement those in addition to kind of fully making a full capacity within the grid for all of our electricity needs.

All right. And David, what about on the recyclability side?

So certainly earlier I mentioned some of the investment in the space in terms of technology and innovation. The investment that Nucor has made over the last several years and even industry-wide that has occurred, you're talking hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in sortation technologies to go from unrefined material to very refined material, which has a lot of impact not just on CO2 emissions but also in the context of landfill. So we actually have a technology that we're using in Florida now where we can –

go in and mine a landfill, pull out previously landfilled material, take it through a separation process and extract aluminum and copper from that material and then re-landfill what's left. So there are plenty of opportunities in the space to continue to refine the recycling and sortation process to make sure that we are getting as much of that reclaimable product as possible.

which from a carbon and from a landfill perspective is really, really impactful. And then I would say from a visibility and logistics management perspective, making sure that we're not trucking or railing material, recycled material, longer distance than is necessary to get it back into a new product because that's also part of emissions measurement systems.

Very interesting. Very interesting about the landfill mining. I hadn't heard about that before. Never even thought about it, honestly. But I think that's really interesting to be able to find more material that we can reclaim and be able to do that, certainly from a sustainability perspective.

So now we look at efforts to reduce environmental impact and how they've become a definite consideration over the last few years. And I'm curious, are there any trends that you all are seeing from end users that are looking to try and make progress?

practical changes, right? Because sometimes some of these projects, maybe they can seem a little daunting or overwhelming or like a huge undertaking. But I'm curious, we'll start with Marty here. What are you seeing from like a practical perspective that end users are starting to do and what types of changes can they start to implement?

Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, awareness is one of the challenges we're facing in the market as it relates to moving customers from an internal combustion-type platform or it's a lead-acid, maybe a lead-acid solution-type platform in a warehouse environment over to a lithium-based solution. In addition to the awareness, there's a lot of fear. There's a lot of fear from customers that...

that don't, there's so many unknowns. Like, what do you mean I have to look at my facility and look at electrical infrastructure? I mean, or I'm running a fleet of lift trucks that use lead acid batteries and we're used to the pains associated with lead acid. So what are you saying to me is like, what do I need to do to move over to a lithium platform? Even though it's electric, it is a separate platform altogether, especially the way you charge it.

So one of the ways that we're overcoming that is really partnering with the end users themselves. I mean, we have dealers that sell our products and they're very used to selling, whether it's a lead acid solution or whether it's an internal combustion solution, but even the lithium is new to them as well.

And we found the best way that we can help customers overcome the fears and anxieties of moving to a different platform. And sometimes they just prefer to live with the pains that they have. We really find that it's important that we not only partner with our dealer partners, but also with the end users themselves.

and literally make them feel that they're not in this alone, that we are working alongside them through every step of the way to understand how they're using their lift trucks, what kind of power demands they see from it, how we can work with them to get their infrastructure, if they need to have any modifications made to it, how we can work alongside them. Because it is a long selling process. It's not just...

selling a forklift and then walking away. It is definitely a process. It's more of a solution selling mentality than just a transactional mentality. And so that's something that the entire market, not just Big Joe is facing, but all the dealers and all end users that are looking at creating a more sustainable warehouse environment has to go through. So partnership for us is the key.

All right, great. And Daniel? Yeah, I'll add in there. Two things that we continue to see as a trend as we work with our Fortune 500 partners is regarding transparency and retrofitting.

You know, transparency comes from understanding our supply chain, understanding what's going to impact them from a finished good and their sustainability goals. And really sitting down to Marty's point, having that partnership, having that solution. And how do we reach the goal together? Because this journey, it's not one sided. It has to be a partnership in order to get there.

And the second thing is around retrofitting. We're seeing a lot of facilities, as I mentioned before, go from standard pallet rack to leveraging automation. So being responsible as you move into that new facility and leveraging automation is super important to reach the sustainability goals. So those two trends, I think they're here to stay for the upcoming years. And there's going to be, to Marty's point, a lot of fear of how to get there. So having the experts there to support you

It's definitely beneficial.

Interesting. Experts to support and partners is what I'm hearing, right? And I think that's a great way to look at it because, you know, to Marty's point a couple times here, that education and awareness is so key to understanding what's even possible in the first place. And what do I even need to think about and how do I even tackle that and begin to do that? So I think we want to leave our audience here with some takeaways, right? So I'm going to ask the panelists, if you put yourself in a customer's shoes or an end user's shoes,

And they're just starting this sustainability journey. I'm going to ask you for just one takeaway of how can they get started today or they leave Chicago, they go back to their business, or maybe they're just so excited they pick up the phone after this panelist and tell their team, we got to do this right now. What is that kind of one takeaway, that first step that you would recommend? And we'll just go down the line here. We'll start with Luke. All right. My biggest one would be...

Procure material domestically. So I spoke earlier about the two methods of steelmaking. Globally, 70% of all steel is still made via a blast furnace, meaning only 30% is made in an EAF facility. However, in the United States, you transpose those numbers. So 70% of our steel here is made via EAF technology, meaning that the United States is one of the greenest steelmaking countries on the planet. So we would love for you to buy it all from Nucor. However...

If you just source it domestically, you're already going to be getting some of the greenest steel that's out there. And then if I can add in one more, because this is my job, demand transparency. Ask for EPDs. Ask for corporate sustainability reports. Ask for recycled content letters. Kind of lean on those partners to help get those transparent documents that help you achieve your sustainability goals and help drive the industry forward by demanding that transparency.

I learn something new every day, Luke. The one thing that I would share with the group is progress, not perfection. Right. We all have to understand, as we talked about it, it's a journey. So you cannot let perfection get in the way of the journey. Start asking questions, work with the experts such as Luke and really just get involved and be curious and make progress.

So I have three words. It's demo, demo, demo. So for those that are in the forklift industry, the demo is a key to really exposing the customers to your product, to your technology, to a solution. And it's amazing from what we've seen by bringing some of our demo integrated purpose-built lithium products into the marketplace.

it immediately cuts back a lot of the fear, the fear of moving from an internal combustion platform or a lead acid type platform over to lithium. And just to be able to see and to touch and to feel technology that exists today that resolves pains that they've been living with for years is really the key. So anybody that walks into our trade show booth and says,

hey, I really don't know about this technology, if it's going to work in my environment. Our trucks have built-in onboard charging on it. So we don't even have to go in to evaluate their infrastructure. As long as they have a 110 or a 220 single phase outlet close by, even if they're a three shift operation, just demo the truck for one shift.

and see how it runs and we have telemetry on our forklift so we can see how the battery is being used, whether they're charging it. And it's amazing just from just having a simple demo out there at the customer site, all the information you can learn and then transmit that in partnership with the dealer back to the customer. And it really does make a huge impact on in addressing a lot of those fears that the market is seeing and going electric. Great. And David? And I would say

The scrap industry has very, very low barriers to entry. And so when you are trying, when you're thinking about recyclability of your own material, you are going to really see a broad range of market participants. And your local scrap yard...

may put a really attractive price for your material in front of you, but they may not be able to offer access to technologies and capabilities and visibility through the supply chain of that material. And in some cases, won't be able to offer you access to markets. So I would just say, if I were starting my journey, I would really focus on

What do I need in terms of visibility and technology and measurement? And, you know, larger players are going to give you a much, much cleaner view.

of what your material is, where it's going, what you're getting paid, where it is in transit, how many miles did it travel, and as it gets through the steel-making process and the end product-making process, getting a really clean look at exactly what the carbon footprint of that material was or is. So I would try to partner with companies that offer kind of that full range of visibility and transparency.

All right, great. So great takeaways there. We have source domestically, right? Progress, not perfection. Demo, demo, demo, right? And then we have work with somebody that can let you know where is that scrap actually going so you can get that end-to-end experience, right? So we have about two-ish minutes left. I think we're opening up for questions here. If anybody has questions in the audience?

Hey, really good learning here. A lot of technology and automation was mentioned, and I was curious, is there a lot of in-house development that you all do, or is there products that you buy off the shelf? Just trying to understand. I can speak from Nucor Enterprise-wide, so...

Generally, we have a smaller team that does research a lot of technologies. A few factors that play into that are cost. How do you bring those to market in an economic way? And a big piece of it is also scalability.

So it's very cute if you can do one pound of something in a laboratory, but then we'll say, can you scale that up by 1,000 or 10,000% that we can bring that into our steelmaking sector? And sometimes that is a huge barrier to entry, is scalability.

we are always exploring new technologies. And as I mentioned earlier, they really fall into those two buckets. It's kind of the energy side and then the material side. I would say for us today, a lot more of it kind of falls onto the material side. I think the energy sector, we know what we have to do. There's just a lot of technology. There's a lot of implementation. There's a lot of costs. There's permitting, all those sorts of things that go into the energy sector. So we really are kind of focusing a lot more on the material side today.

right now. Yeah. All right. Anybody want to add anything there? I'll add a little bit if it's a little bit different spin because it's forklift market. But again, on the automation side, I mean, that goes hand in hand. Like everything I've been talking about is electrification of the market, moving away from internal combustion to electric. But if you really look at it holistically, what we're really talking about is once you move everything from an internal combustion type platform to electric, you'll...

Taking the next step in automating the solution is that much easier. So we're seeing that in the automotive market. You're seeing driverless cars, but they're all driverless cars based on what? These are electric platforms. So we're seeing the same thing in the lift truck market as well. That way, if you come to our booth, you will see an autonomous mobile robot operating in our booth alongside some of our electrification products. And that's really our passion is first electrify the market, next, then automate it.

All right, great. And a great way to close it there. And thank you to our panelists here today. Let's give them a round of applause here. Great job. Great insights here. There are some additional materials that I believe you can download through the app or through the ProMAT portal to be able to look at as well to get a better understanding of what they were talking about today. So thank you so much to our panelists and thank you everybody for joining.

You've been listening to the New Warehouse Podcast with Kevin Lawton. Subscribe and check us out online at thenewwarehouse.com. Enjoyed this episode? Make sure you are subscribed to the podcast and for more content from The New Warehouse, find us on LinkedIn and YouTube. Links to subscribe can be found in the show notes. And for everything The New Warehouse, head to thenewwarehouse.com.