Logistics & Material Handling

Today’s global marketplace requires complex logistical networks to keep our economy on track. Lead batteries play a critical role in making it happen like clockwork. Approximately 76% of all material handling equipment, from freight trains to electric forklifts, use advanced lead batteries to, literally, move the economy.

Reliable Deliveries – Everyday, Everywhere

Lead battery technology helps keep our supply chains open and materials moving to meet our everyday needs:

  • Ensures consumers, grocery stores, hospitals and schools have food, fuel, medicine and supplies.
  • Ensures manufacturers have the raw materials needed to build and repair infrastructure, and to make new products that improve our lives.
  • Ensures that building and construction industries can easily move onsite materials.
Lead batteries support logistics and material handling

Making Multimodal Connections

Lead batteries support the material handling equipment – like forklifts and semitrucks – that, in turn, enable multimodal land, air and sea deliveries. Put simply, lead batteries are paramount to ensuring essential goods, materials and supplies get to where they need to go.

Consider this example: When a ship arrives at port, cranes, forklifts and trucks do the heavy lifting:

  • Forklifts remove shipping container contents to lift trucks.
  • Lift trucks deliver contents to distribution centers.
  • Forklifts move contents to warehouses to await final delivery.

In the heavy-duty tractor-trailer fleet, lead batteries start the engine. That’s central to a U.S. economy that depends on trucks to deliver nearly 70% of all freight transported annually. Lead batteries also power a multitude of cab and bunk conveniences that make road life more comfortable for drivers.

In the aviation industry, lead batteries are the go-to battery type for powering aircraft. They’re found in the piston aircraft, turboprops and business jets that deliver people, mail and emergency supplies quickly, day or night.

In the rail market, lead batteries start and power trains and rapid rail systems. Like cars, locomotives need a battery to start the engine and provide electric power for lighting and controls when the engine is off. Lead batteries do that, and they power the signal lights and crossing barriers to keep everyone safe.

Logistics and material handling electric forklift with lead battery

Zero-Emission Electric Forklifts

Lead batteries enable this clean technology to meet the fast-paced, 24-7 demand to fulfill orders on time and keep our economy on track. Better yet, electric forklifts do so with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to other technologies.

As communities work toward carbon neutrality to slow climate change, zero-emission electric forklifts are serious contenders to replace their internal combustion (IC) competitors. Electric forklifts offer significant environmental advantages:

  • A comparable fleet of electric forklifts will use 83.5% less CO2 than its IC counterpart.
  • Sustainable lead batteries are nearly 100% recyclable.
  • No engine, transmission or coolant fluid changes.
  • No need to dispose of used fluids, oils and filters.
  • Reduced noise pollution.
  • Cleaner goods in warehouses and facilities.

Without question, lead batteries have evolved to meet today’s material handling demands. Advanced lead batteries offer improved productivity, charging times and performance, using a safer, greener technology.

View Our Zero-Emission Forklifts Fact Sheet

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