Collaboration pays off to cut emissions

Last month, the Clean Cargo Working Group (CCWG) published their annual CO2 emission performance data for the container shipping industry. Overall, industry performance is improving with average CO2 performance for carriers across all trade lanes improving 8% from 2013 to 2014 (29% since 2009) - which is a quite remarkable achievement in a single year.

Maersk Line is performing better than CCWG average on almost all trades and globally Maersk Line has more than a 10% advantage over the global CCWG industry average. In comparison with last year’s numbers, Maersk Line’s CO2 average across all trade lanes has improved 32% in the previous three years.

More than 40 global customers and container carriers are part of the CCWG (representing 80% of all global container shipments) and are dedicated to accelerating sustainability improvements in the container shipping industry. They do this by developing aligned environmental standards, tools and comparable performance data, enabling customers to benchmark environmental performance and integrate environmental performance indicators into procurement decisions.

A particular strength of the CCWG is to collect and report CO2 emission performance data not only on a global level, but also more granularly for a set of standardised trade lanes, e.g. Asia to the West Coast of North America. Furthermore the submitted data is verified independently to secure high data quality.

Several Maersk Line customers have an ambition to grow their business in a responsible way and the independent verified data from CCWG allows customers to integrate CO2 data into their supplier selection together with other sustainability parameters without worrying about data quality.

Customers interested in CO2 partnerships include Tetra Pak, DB Schenker and BMW, all of which have signed Carbon Pacts with Maersk Line, show mutual commitments to improve the sustainability performance of their ocean transportation.

“Sustainability is key factor and long term strategy for our business to reduce the CO2 emissions in the future,” comments Norbert Dierkes, Head of Transport Sustainability at BMW. “For us it is really important that suppliers have the same sustainability standards as BMW. This is possible because of the transparency that Maersk Line proves as our partner. This Carbon Pact allows us to measure our impact and that is very important for us to know.”

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