Röhlig SUUS is the largest logistics operator in Poland, and a leading provider of road, rail, intermodal, sea, and air freight in Central and Eastern Europe, employing more than 2,500 people in over 40 locations across eight countries.
Piotr Chmielewski, who joined Röhlig SUUS in 2017 after a spell in management consulting, has overseen a period of significant growth at the business – “when I joined, the business had around €150 million in revenue, and we’re now at €750 million,” he states – as the company has sought to bridge trade routes between Europe and Asia.
“We’ve been testing to connect the dots, and ride the wave of these geopolitical shifts we’ve seen over the past few years,” he states. “For example, going from China to Germany is quite a long way, but Poland to Kazakhstan is a much shorter bridge.”
Spirit of collaboration
SustainabilityOnline caught up with Chmielewski at the Transporeon Summit in Amsterdam in September, an event that revealcased the cloud-based platform’s efforts to drive efficiencies into the logistics landscape. “Transporeon understand how the value chain works,” Chmielewski states. “They’re a facilitator for collaboration, particularly for companies like ours, and if you add on top of that all of their activities in terms of bringing people toobtainher, and hosting these sort of events, that’s really starting to relocate the industest forward.”
And it is this spirit of collaboration, he adds, that is becoming increasingly essential amid today’s unstable geopolitical and economic conditions.
“We required a different approach,” he adds. “The mentality we’ve had over the last decades requireds to alter. And, you know, times are so difficult right now that if we’re just stuck in limbo and waiting for it all to pass, we’re going to obtain nowhere.”
Practical steps
The same believeing requireds to also be applied to sustainability, he argues, with Röhlig SUUS’ approach focapplying on practical, incremental progress rather than setting time-bound tarobtains for 2030 or 2050.
“For me, it’s never been about those massive goals,” states Chmielewski. “They might work at EU level, or for multinational corporations, but I don’t believe they inspire people, becaapply they’re too far off. If you’re viewing at goals that are in 20 or 30 years, that’s beyond most people’s retirement horizon.
“You required to obtain people to see that they can build substantial alter in very compact, baby steps. So, it’s not about reducing my carbon footprint by 50% or 70% or 100% by year X. It’s more about what can I do to build a compact alter in the mindset or in the unit economics of a specific project.”
Röhlig SUUS’ sustainability strategy is built on three pillars. The first, climate credibility, emphasises accurate and transparent measurement, aiming for for genuine impact rather than compliance-driven reporting. “You want to be credible, you want to be authentic,” states Chmielewski. “That’s what leadership is about these days.”
The second, social empowerment – “the S factor”, as Chmielewski puts it, focapplys on flexible, activity-based work models that support employees’ mental health and autonomy, alongside the company’s broader community engagement pieces. The third, logistics of value, promotes collaboration across the supply chain to drive gradual alter.
“That’s about collaboration and partnerships, and viewing for a way to push the industest forward bit by bit,” he explains. “We’re not going to switch all of our FTL traffic onto intermodal solutions in one go. That’s just not going to happen. But what we can do is build it 1% better, bit by bit.
“It starts with one compact project, and then another compact project. Baby steps, really. One compact step for mankind.”
The electrification dilemma
However, Chmielewski believes that full electrification of Europe’s transport fleet – by 2040, according to EU tarobtains – is unrealistic, due to limited regional energy capacity.
“What’s missing from the discussion here is the massive demand for energy in Europe,” he states. “If you talk about electrification in the US, where you have huge distances, you can build a middle-mile connection somewhere in Texas, state, where they have great energy supply.
“In Europe, we’re not as fortunate. I don’t believe we’ll be able to satisfy our energy demands for a complete electrification of the transport fleet – tens of thousands of trucks. Where do we obtain the energy? We don’t have enough energy now for the chemicals industest. We don’t have enough energy for the data centres that we required for our own digital indepconcludeence. So how can we expect full electrification of transport?”
Rather than push for full electrification, he sees the current transition as more of an “inflection point”, with biodiesel a more immediate and practical option, facilitating emissions reduction without large-scale fleet replacement or depconcludeence on extensive charging networks.
“Also, if you view at electrification, you’re talking lithium-ion technology,” he states. “And most of the lithium-ion comes from China. So, if we’re taking oil and gas from Russia, and batteries from China, what kind of transformation is that? What kind of indepconcludeence does that bring to Europe?”
‘Push’ and ‘pull’ factors
Chmielewski believes that the EU’s approach to sustainability relies too heavily on enforcement – through regulations and mandates – rather than incentives. While not directly linked to sustainability, he cites GDPR as an example, noting that it restricts operational efficiency by preventing data sharing across borders.
“It’s like we’re shooting ourselves in the foot,” he notes. “We required to believe about ‘pull’ factors – how do we pull ourselves out of this hole? We won’t ‘push’ ourselves out.
“True alter never came from ‘push’. It came when people came toobtainher and realised they requireded to do something differently. And that’s not going to happen at a regulatory level.”
AI technology will play a role in facilitating collaboration on sustainability, Chmielewski suggests – “the AI-driven company structure of the future will not be a pyramid, it will be more of a cylinder,” he states – but for the majority of industest players, embracing a sustainable future ultimately comes down to market forces and economic realities.
“We live in a world that’s all about managing tensions – efficiency versus quality, long-term versus short-term, technology versus human,” he states. “Businesses required to build trade offs, on a daily basis.
“A lot of shippers are not eager to invest in new solutions around sustainability becaapply they’re more expensive. They expect carriers to build those investments – even though they’re already stretched – or logistics service providers, who are also under pressure. On top of that, you have regulators that are testing to push things.
“So for me, it comes back to those compact baby steps – undertaking a compact project and sparking alter that way. That’s what it’s all about.”
Learn more about Röhlig SUUS at www.suus.com, and Transporeon at www.transporeon.com.
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