One industry, different realities: sustainability and the moving sector

When it comes to sustainability, what matters for a mover? And what matters most to a corporate or an RMC? What are the different roles and resources? Paul Barnes investigates.

Sustainability is now a regular topic across global mobility. Corporate clients and RMCs ask about it and build it into tenders. They need assurance that suppliers are reducing their impact, managing emissions, and controlling risk. Movers are expected to respond – often quickly, in detail, and typically with limited resources. What is often missing from the discussion is a simple but crucial point: not everyone in global mobility experiences sustainability in the same way.

Proximity to delivery

One useful way to understand the different needs of stakeholder groups is to look at proximity to service delivery. Organisations closer to delivering the service – such as movers – experience sustainability differently from those further away from day-to-day service delivery, such as RMCs and corporate mobility teams. For movers, sustainability is closely linked to daily decisions, time pressure, and practical constraints. By contrast, RMCs and corporate mobility teams operate further upstream, where sustainability is often experienced with a focus on policy, governance, reporting, and reputational risk.

Movers: closer to delivery

Movers sit firmly in the “closer to delivery” category. Where an organisation is directly responsible for the delivery of a service, sustainability is often felt as additional work layered onto an already demanding operation. That doesn’t imply a lack of interest or concern – it reflects the reality of limited time, limited resources, and the need to prioritise getting the job done.

For movers, sustainability support is most valuable when it is practical, time-efficient, and immediately usable. In practice, this usually means a preference for templates that reduce effort and allow consistent answers to RFP questions without specialist expertise, realistic examples that show how sustainability works in day-to-day moving operations, and step-by-step guidance that clarifies what to do first, what can follow later, and what is “good enough” at an early stage.

Sustainability – arriving through procurement

For movers, sustainability is often first encountered as a questionnaire or tender question: “Do you measure emissions?”, “Do you have targets?”, “What actions have you taken to reduce CO₂?” Answering these credibly, consistently, and repeatedly takes time – especially without a dedicated sustainability team.

A simple but powerful industry improvement would be for RMCs to align core sustainability terminology and agree a set of common baseline questions that they ask their suppliers. Even partial alignment across most standard questions would reduce duplication, improve data consistency, and make it easier for movers to provide clear, credible responses.

Two tracks, one direction

A useful idea for the industry is an increased focus on two complementary tracks. Track 1 is practical, delivery-focused support designed for organisations closer to delivery: templates for common sustainability questions, basic emission measurement guidance, realistic emission reduction examples, and short, practical learning sessions. Track 2 covers standards and alignment, more relevant for those further from delivery, providing frameworks and approaches that support consistency, comparability and credibility across supply chains. These tracks are not in conflict – they solve different problems for different parts of the ecosystem.

Match expectations to reality

Progress will happen faster when expectations are aligned with the reality of moving operations, and when movers are supported with more practical tools and clear guidance. The aim should not be to push every company to the same level at the same speed. It should be to help each part of the industry move forward from where it is in a way that is realistic, measurable, and meaningful for its role and resources.

For movers, that means recognising that practical actions taken today matter. Tracking emissions, reducing waste, improving efficiency, and answering sustainability questions honestly are all signs of progress. None of these require perfection. What they require is clarity, logic, and transparency. When movers are supported to explain what they are doing now, what they are working on, and what comes next, sustainability increasingly becomes part of everyday service delivery rather than just another box to tick in a tender.

Paul Barnes is Director of Inspire Global Mobility Consulting.

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