Freightos, a global freight pricing and booking platform, is the latest company to launch a free carbon calculator tool that allows freight forwarders, importers, and exporters to estimate and compare emissions for specific shipping routes and modes.
Importers, exporters, and forwarders can embed the CO2 calculator into their websites or platforms.
“Freightos recognises the immense challenges for global freight to achieve net zero and we’re committed to help achieve that by bringing visibility to two billion tonnes per year of invisible GHG emissions from freight services,” said Zvi Schreiber, CEO of Freightos. “Armed with this visibility, the industry can better approach the challenging mission of decarbonisation.”
An air fryer shipped from Shenzhen to Los Angeles can be responsible for anywhere from the equivalent of .05 kilograms of CO2 (kgCO2e) when shipped by ocean to 32 kgCO2e when shipped by air, according to Freightos. This means that in the United States alone, the carbon emissions for the more than 25m air fryers shipped to the US from 2020 to 2021 was around 1.25m kgCO2e, equivalent to the amount of CO2 generated by a car driving up and back to the moon more than 16 times.
Liner shipping’s own carbon calculators have been the source of much criticism over the years.
The carbon emissions for the more than 25m air fryers shipped to the US from 2020 to 2021 was the equivalent to the amount of CO2 generated by a car driving up and back to the moon more than 16 times
Putting the issue in sharp relief, Lars Jensen, CEO of liner consultancy Vespucci Maritime, via LinkedIn last month, took the Ocean Alliance’s service from New York to Shanghai.
All four Ocean Alliance carriers, Evergreen, CMA CGM, COSCO and OOCL, have an online CO2 footprint calculator. If a customer books with any of these, the cargo will go on the exact same vessel on the exact same routing.
CMA CGM shows the emissions from New York to Shanghai as 1370, 1770 or 1779 kg of CO2 depending on which of the three different services selected, while alliance partner COSCO stands out for its green offering, showing the lowest emission at 437, 516 or 533 kg depending on the service chosen.
“In essence a shipper, who actually believes these numbers, could dramatically reduce their CO2 footprint in their own environmental reporting by switching from CMA CGM to COSCO. Which of course would amount to no CO2 change at all as the cargo will move on exactly the same vessel,” Jensen observed in a widely read post on LinkedIn, going on to suggest that the shoddy, non-uniform CO2 calculators that have been an issue for shippers for many years create an opportunity for forwarders to develop their own calculators to at least compare directly across carriers.
