Sustainable Logistics Insights

The EU ETS now covers maritime shipping. CSRD requires Scope 3 reporting for 50,000+ companies. IMO's CII ratings penalize inefficient vessels. Here's what freight companies need to do — with specific deadlines and thresholds.

FuelEU Maritime came into force 1 January 2025. The 2025 reporting year closes 31 December 2025; pooling submissions due 30 April 2026. Penalty: EUR 2,400 per tonne VLSFO-equivalent. For a 1,000-vessel European liner fleet running 3% over the cap, the modelled penalty is roughly EUR 178M before pooling relief.

MEPC 82 (Sept-Oct 2024) consolidated the mid-term measures debate; MEPC 83 (April 2025) formally adopted the combined GHG Fuel Standard plus remedial unit price framework. What is confirmed, what is still draft text, and the realistic 2026-2030 implementation timeline.

The cubic speed-fuel relationship derived from naval hydrodynamics. 8,500 TEU container ship dropping from 22 to 17 knots saves 43% of voyage fuel but costs USD 235,000 in inventory carry per voyage. The break-even bunker price, and where slow steaming pays vs where it breaks.

SAF sits at 0.3% of global jet fuel supply. ReFuelEU mandates 2% by 2025, 6% by 2030, 70% by 2050. Cost per tCO2-avoided: USD 300-800 for HEFA, USD 800-1,400 for synthetic. The honest take: SAF mandates are real, but SAF will not be the dominant aviation freight decarbonisation lever before 2035.

The January 2023 Guardian / Die Zeit / SourceMaterial investigation found ~90% of audited REDD+ credits did not represent real reductions. Verra responded with new methodology VM0048. What VM0048 actually changes, what it does not, and what freight operators should buy if they want a credible offset claim.

Most vendors push SDKs because they make better case studies. For many freight integration patterns the raw REST API is what you actually want. When SDK is the right call, when it is not, and the six questions to ask any emissions vendor before signing.

DEFRA is simpler for UK-only SECR reporting. GLEC is the right base for any lane that crosses a border or any shipper that reports to CDP or CSRD. The 8% gap on UK heavy truck, the LNG and biofuel and reefer divergences, and my honest opinion on which way to point a calculator.

GLEC is the factor table. ISO 14083 is the methodology. They sit on top of each other, not next to each other. What each one specifies, where they overlap, and what changes on the same shipment when you swap the methodology stack underneath the GLEC factors.

If your calculator is on v3.0, what do your numbers do when you upgrade to v3.2? Same Shanghai-Rotterdam shipment in both versions, the percent move by mode, when to migrate, and whether to restate the prior year.

I work on EcoFreight. Honest, biased-but-disclosed comparison of the freight emissions APIs I have integrated against — methodology, public pricing, latency, primary-data ingestion, and where each one actually wins.

Scope 3 Category 4 is upstream transportation and distribution — freight emissions from goods you bought. CDP's climate questionnaire accepts GLEC-aligned numbers under ISO 14083 data quality tiers. Here's the field-by-field mapping — C6.5, C6.5a, C6.7 — and the calculation approach the auditors actually want to see.

The CBAM definitive period began 1 January 2026. EU importers of steel, aluminium, cement, fertiliser, hydrogen, and electricity now buy carbon certificates against embedded emissions — including the freight leg. Here is what data your importer will ask for, with a worked EUR 1.5M example.

A ULCV emits about 0.6 g CO2e per tonne-km laden. A 3,000-TEU feeder emits about 12 g. Two orders of magnitude apart. We break down the per-class numbers using GLEC v3.2 factors and the IMO Fourth GHG Study.

GLEC v3.2 is the current edition; v4 is in draft. Five changes between v3.0 and v3.2 actually move numbers in production calculators — container ship segmentation, LNG WTW, articulated truck lane utilisation, belly cargo allocation, and a separate hub line item. Here's each one with the percent impact.

The Strait of Hormuz carries 21% of global oil. A disruption forces tankers around the Cape of Good Hope, adding 6,400 km per voyage. We calculated the emission impact for VLCCs, LNG carriers, and container ships using GLEC v3.2.

When the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal in 2021, ships rerouted via the Cape added 3,000+ nautical miles and roughly 300,000 tonnes of extra CO2. We break down the emission math for three major chokepoints.

We walk through three real emission calculations — a 40ft container Shanghai to Rotterdam, a truck from Munich to Milan, and an air cargo pallet LAX to Narita — showing every formula, factor, and assumption.

Transport accounts for 16% of global greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC AR6). But the number that matters for freight companies isn't the global total — it's the 3.5 gigatonnes from freight alone, and how regulators are coming for it.

Ocean freight: 2.9% of global CO2. Road freight: 4.3%. Air cargo: 0.5% of flights but 3.5% of aviation emissions. The IMO's Fourth GHG Study and IEA data paint a specific picture — here's what it means for your Scope 3 reporting.

Slow steaming saves 30% fuel per voyage. Telematics-based route optimization cuts truck fuel by 10-15%. LED reefer upgrades pay back in 8 months. We ranked 12 freight decarbonization moves by ROI.

A single API call to EcoFreight calculates WTW emissions in under 50ms. Here's what happens behind the scenes — from geocoding origins to selecting emission factors to handling data quality tiers.

Maersk's green methanol vessels are running. Tesla Semis are delivering for PepsiCo. SAF hit 0.3% of global jet fuel supply. We separate the real progress from the press releases.

Voluntary carbon credit prices range from $2 to $200/tonne. Berkeley Carbon Trading Project found that 40% of offsets have quality issues. Here's how to tell the difference for your freight operations.

I have shipped ML route optimisation into production on two carriers. The honest number is 10-15% on Asia-Europe — not 23%, not 50%. Here is what the model does, where it loses to a planner (cold start, port strikes, off-distribution typhoons), and what actually goes in the request.

Rail emits 15-40 g CO2/tkm vs. road's 60-150 g. But that 75% saving disappears on routes under 300 km or where terminal transfers add 2+ days. We run the numbers for 6 common European corridors.

SBTi-aligned net-zero targets require 90% absolute reduction by 2050. For freight, that means solving last-mile electrification, ocean fuel, and air cargo — three problems with no ready answers. Here's what you can actually do today.

Most companies still calculate freight emissions in Excel, quarterly, with 3-month-old data. An API-based approach gives you per-shipment numbers in milliseconds. We compare the two workflows and what switches when you make the move.