specialreport SUSTAINABILITY
First, Ocean Spray owned the facilities at each end of the lane. That was
crucial, Blanco explains, because it
meant the company could increase
inventory at the Florida DC and not
ask customers to adjust their own
order patterns. “Without opening the
Florida DC, they would not have had
the flexibility to move that many
goods by rail to Florida,” he says.
Second, Ocean Spray had the right
kind of freight profile. Rail shipping
works well for products that move in
fairly regular volumes. Although
Ocean Spray had all kinds of ship-
ments, Blanco says, much of its
freight consisted of what he charac-
terizes as “constant and continuous”
shipments. “The warehouse still had
to plan for some products that don’t
[fit this profile], and those still move
by truck,” he notes. “While that
increased complexity, it was worth it
from a cost perspective and an envi-
ronmental perspective.”
Third, the shift to rail proved
workable because of the rail termi-
nals’ proximity to the Ocean Spray
DCs at each end. The dray from the
New Jersey DC to the CSX rail termi-
nal is about 60 miles, and the dray
from the Florida terminal to the
Lakeland DC about 65 miles. “That’s
crucial for a couple of reasons,”
Blanco says. “One is simply the abili-
ty to coordinate shipping. But it is
also crucial from a CO2 perspective.”
Longer drays would quickly have
eroded the cost and emissions sav-
ings, he explains.
The success of the project has led
Ocean Spray to begin evaluating
other lanes for possible conversion to
rail. “It took us a little while to work
through [the program],” Young says,
“but it has been a huge success.
Internally, we talk about how we can
[identify] other high-volume lanes
where we might be able to find rail
opportunities.
“This whole project shows there are
real savings in both cost and carbon,”
she adds. “It just makes good business
sense for us to collaborate.” ;
Calculating CO2
Looking to calculate your own freight transportation carbon footprint but
don’t know how to go about it? We asked Edgar Blanco, research director
for MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics and author of the Ocean
Spray study, what’s involved.
According to Blanco, a number of factors go into the calculation of total
CO2 emissions from freight transportation: the type of equipment, the
weight of the equipment and the load, how it’s operated, and more. That
kind of information may be readily available to equipment owners, but
it’s a bit more complicated for shippers who hire truckers and railroads to
move their freight.
Still, Blanco argues, it can be done. Over the past few years, carriers like
CSX Transportation have published network-level data showing the amount
of CO2 emitted. Blanco says those numbers are broken down by distance and
weight. As a result, researchers can derive a “rail emission factor” that he
considers a fairly good estimate for shippers to use in their own calculations.
Trucking gets more complex because of the sheer number of motor carriers and their wide diversity. But Blanco contends that it’s also possible to get
a broad measure to compare modes. He cautions, however, that there is not
enough precise data to differentiate among carriers in the same mode.
Here’s a brief look a the calculations that Blanco used in his research for
the Ocean Spray case study:
CO2 emissions (road) =
shipment weight road distance road emission factor
The road emission factor represents the CO2 generated by moving one
U.S. ton of cargo ( 2,000 pounds) one mile using road transportation. For
the study, MIT used 149.7 grams of CO2 per ton-mile, a number that the
study says corresponds to the average emissions of all fleets included in
the EPA’s Smart Way Shipper Tools.
