Container Carriers Bringing Down Carbon Emission

BSR’s Clean Cargo Working Group (CCWG) said in its latest annual CO2 emission performance data for the container shipping industry that on an average, its member carriers have reduced CO2 emissions per container transported in 2013 by 7.7%.

Clean Cargo Working Group is a business to business collaboration between 40+ global customers and container carriers dedicated to accelerating sustainability improvements in the container shipping industry.

This is the fifth year that CCWG has released its average trade lane emissions data in an effort to improve transparency and understanding of environmental impacts from goods transport. This is also the first year in which they disclose aggregated average utilization factors for each trade lane.

The carriers included in CCWG represent 85% of all global container shipments, encompassing over 2, 900 ships calculated from 23 of the world’s leading ocean container carriers.

A particular strength of the CCWG is that it collects and reports CO2 performance data not only at a global level, but also at a granular level for a set of standardised transportation routes (‘trade lanes’) e.g. Asia to the West Coast of North America. This gives customers more transparency in terms of performance numbers for the routes that they use – providing a more credible way of comparing performance.

The continued performance improvement is also attributed to carrier fleet efficiency and data quality, both of which have direct benefits for shipping customers.

As was reported earlier this year, Maersk Line has reduced CO2 emissions by 12% per container-kilometre in 2013 alone.

“In total, we have now reduced our CO2 emissions by more than 34% since 2007. This is also reflected in the company’s absolute emissions, where we managed to cut emissions by 3.8 million tonnes in 2013 – despite growing our business by 4.1%,” Maersk said.

“If we compare our ‘transportation route’ performance against the latest CCWG figures for the rest of the industry, Maersk Line continues to excel. In this benchmark, Maersk Line is the top performer or performing better than industry average on almost all transportation routes. On some of the largest routes, we are more than 20% better than the average transportation route performance,” Maersk added.

Full report available here.

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Press Release, August 27, 2014