The Clean Cargo Working Group (CCWG) has just published annual CO2 emission performance data for the container shipping industry. On an average, member carriers have reduced CO2 emissions per container transported in 2013 by 7.7% – a remarkable achievement in a single year!

Clean Cargo Working Group is a B2B collaboration between 40+ global customers and container carriers dedicated to accelerating sustainability improvements in the container shipping industry. They do so by developing aligned environmental standards, tools and comparable performance data which enables customers to benchmark environmental performance and integrate environmental performance indicators into procurement decisions – In other words, using transparency to drive sustainable performance improvements. The Clean Cargo Working Group (CCWG) consists of customers including well-known brands such as Nike, Walmart, Heineken, IKEA, Marks & Spencer, Electrolux and DHL. The carriers included in CCWG represent 85% of all global container shipments.

ccg1A particular strength of the CCWG is that it collects and reports CO2 performance data not only at a global level, but also at a granular level for a set of standardised transportation routes (‘trade lanes’) e.g. Asia to the West Coast of North America. This gives customers more transparency in terms of performance numbers for the routes that they use – providing a more credible way of comparing performance.

Maersk Line is outperforming the rest of the industry

As was reported earlier this year, Maersk Line has reduced CO2 emissions by 12% per container-kilometre in 2013 alone. In total, we have now reduced our CO2 emissions by more than 34% since 2007*. This is also reflected in the company’s absolute emissions, where we managed to cut emissions by 3.8 million tonnes in 2013 – despite growing our business by 4.1%.

If we compare our ‘transportation route’ performance against the latest CCWG figures for the rest of the industry, Maersk Line continues to excel. In this benchmark, Maersk Line is the top performer or performing better than industry average on almost all transportation routes. On some of the largest routes, we are more than 20% better than the average transportation route performance!

Less CO2 for Maersk Line means less CO2 for our customers. The latest figures confirm that Maersk Line’s customers can reduce CO2 emissions by shipping their products with us compared to an average carrier.