Cutting the carbon footprint: plain sailing?

Whether it's through e-commerce, offsets or sailing firms are increasingly looking to ways to cut the carbon footprint of their shipping operations

The great thing about buying organic vegetables is knowing that the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you eat them has nothing to do with the pesticides you're ingesting. Who could resist a guilt-free mango, or a banana, bereft of blame?

Sadly, however, there is always some kind of environmental overhead, and Sean Cash, an economist in the Department of Rural Economy at the University of Alberta, says that organic or not, carbon emissions are still a major problem with food shipping.

"For certain products, there were large differences – mangoes, green peppers, bananas, were products that travelled further on average in their organic form to get here, than in their non-organic form," he says. "So whatever the benefits were from an environmental perspective, some of them at least were being offset by the extra carbon."

Whether or not going organic always generates net environmental benefits remains a moot point, but Cash's research does highlight an important issue for many businesses relying heavily on logistics, which is the environmental impact of their shipping operations. From traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers through to e-commerce firms almost all companies rely to some extent on shipping, and those that want to be considered green will naturally need to look at ways of mitigating its effects. The question is how can that be done?

Give them credit?
Carbon credits, which seem to be the answer for a range of environmental problems these days, have naturally been embraced as a solution for this one too. Greenworld LLC uses the concept of carbon offsetting for shipping activities with its ShipGreen site. " ShipGreen uses the unique weight, distance, and transportation mode of a shipment to determine the amount of carbon dioxide emissions of a customer shipment," says chief executive Jason Sperling. "Then, it presents customers with several options for offsetting their shipment, such as tree reforestation, solar, or wind power projects that remove or prevent carbon dioxide from being put into the air."

ShipGreen currently targets e-commerce companies that want to adopt a greener approach to shipping. The service provides a collection of files to companies who integrate them into their websites. When customers place an order, they get the option to add an extra fee to the purchase price, which will be used to buy carbon credits in qualifying projects, explains Sperling. "All of the projects we support are inspected, verified, and certified by independent third parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions according to the Kyoto Protocol and to The Gold Standard or the standards set forth by the Climate, Community & Biodiversity Alliance," he says.

But how are such credits calculated? The carbon overhead involved with shipping a product includes a number of parameters, some of which are not particularly obvious. Shipgreen uses an algorithm developed by academics at the University of California in Berkeley. Among them was Arpad Horvath, associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering, and a director at the Consortium on Green Design and Manufacturing. "In summary, we have done the most complete research to date on US truck, rail, and air freight transport, taking into account not just tailpipe emissions, but also energy use and emissions from making the fuels, manufacturing the vehicles, and constructing and operating the infrastructure for transportation," he says.

The Berkeley algorithm seems to be the most appropriate one available for those wanting to apply some mathematics to their shipping practices and work out how much carbon they're using. The implementation has some shortcomings - Shipgreen is unable to use it to calculate international shipping emissions today, although Sperling says that the company is working on it.

Complexities of e-commerce
The other nice-to-have would be a way of applying the calculations internally, so that companies can use it to assess emissions from shipping arrangements that simply keep their own business running, rather than using it to calculate emissions purely from direct shipments to customers. That would make it useful for manufacturers shipping to wholesalers and bricks-and-mortar retailers, rather than just for ecommerce firms. Again, it's in the pipeline, says Sperling.

The environmental overhead of shipping differs significantly between the e-commerce and the physical retail sector. In their paper, Economic and Environmental Implications of Online Retailing in the United States, Scott Matthews and Chris Hendrickson used book retail as a case study. Are customers harming the planet more in aggregate by ordering books from Amazon, or by hopping in the Mazda and driving down to Borders?

"The e-commerce model is at worst comparable to the traditional model, and under normal conditions, superior," says the paper. Why? Because in physical retail, unsold books have to be returned from the retailer, creating a round trip for shippers. That rarely happens in e-commerce. It also makes it likely that the equation will change depending on another parameter: product type. And are things likely to be the same in other regions with different population densities such as, say, the UK?

"E-commerce is very complicated, exists in many different formats, varies from region to region, and the same example redone under different conditions may yield different results," says Horvath. "It is time for us to have an organised effort at quantifying the environmental effects of the Internet economy. This is yet another area we don't know much about."

Another open question is whether carbon credits are the right way to tackle emissions from shipping. Giving money to projects designed to reduce carbon output elsewhere doesn't stop companies from spouting their own CO2, after all.

"Carbon credits can help, but only once we have put in place much more energy and environmental efficiency than we currently have, and get as much reduction through innovation, prudent budgeting, and good practice as we can," says Horvath. "Experiments like the Beluga Skysail will help, but there is a long way before we will see it on every cargo ship, big and small. Shouldn't we also look at cleaner marine fuel? Port operations, too, need to be looked at environmentally."

While the shipping industry accelerates such efforts to develop greener technologies, businesses keen to cut their contribution to shipping emissions will be left to either offset or investigate ways to tweak their supply chains and business models in favour of e-commerce approaches that tend to cut down on the number of journeys taken by their products.