Ecological Transport Information Tool for Worldwide ... - Schenker

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IFEU Heidelberg, Öko-Institut, IVE, RMCON
1 Background and task
Global trade and transport of goods has become as a matter of course the basis of our
modern way of life. However, transport wastes limited natural resources and significantly
contributes to a major challenge of the 21 st century: Global warming. More than a quarter of
the worldwide CO 2 -emissions are caused by the transport sector, with a tendency to growing
faster than in any other sector. The way we organize the increasing logistic flows is therefore
gaining importance.
Against this background EcoTransIT World addresses to
• forwarding companies willing to reduce the environmental impact of their shipments
• carriers and logistic providers being confronted with growing requests from customers as
well as legislation to show their carbon footprint and improve their logistical chains from
an environmental perspective
• political decision makers, consumers and non-governmental organisations that are interested
in a thorough environmental comparison of logistic concepts including all transport
modes (railway, lorry, ship, airplane and combined transport).
EcoTransIT World means Ecological Transport Information Tool – worldwide. It is a free of
charge internet application, which shows the environmental impact of freight transport – for
any route in the world and any transport mode. More than showing the impact of a single
shipment it analyses and compares different transport chains with each other thus making
evident, which is the solution with the lowest impact.
The environmental parameters covered are energy consumption, green house gas emissions
and air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides (NO x ), sulphur dioxide (SO 2 ), non-methane
hydro carbons (NMHC) and particles.
The online application offers two levels: In a standard mode it allows a rough estimate. This
can be refined in an expert mode according to the degree of information available for the
shipment. Thus all relevant parameters like route characteristics and length, load factor and
empty trips, vehicle size and engine type are individually taken into account.
For the first time EcoTransIT was published in 2003 with the regional scope limited to
Europe. The recent version in 2010 is EcoTransIT World, which for first time allows calculating
environmental impacts of world wide transports. For this purpose the routing of the tool
as well as the information about environmental impacts of all transport modes, in particular
sea and air transport, was expanded.
The internet version of EcoTransIT as well as the integrated route planner for all transport
modes have been realised by IVE/RmCon Hannover. The basic methodology and data for
the environment calculations have been developed by IFEU Heidelberg and Öko-Institut.
Originally, EcoTransIT World was initiated by a railway consortium. Today it includes six
railway undertakings, the International Union of Railways (UIC) and one logistic provider. In
future the consortium aims at including players from all modes thus offering with EcoTransIT
World a ‘best-practice’ standard of carbon foot-printing and green accounting to the whole
sector – compliant with international standards.
The following report summarizes the methodology and data of EcoTransIT World.
EcoTransIT World: Methodology and Data – July 15 th , 2010