ATRI Says Shipper Pressure Forces Truckers to Seek Complex Carbon Measurement Tools

This story appears in the June 28 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

Although trucking companies do not yet face a legal mandate to report their carbon emissions, some shippers continue to demand such disclosure, forcing truckers to choose between several complex reporting methods, the American Transportation Research Institute said.

“It seems like more of a shipper impetus behind this,” said Mike Tunnell, director of environmental research for ATRI and the principal investigator on the group’s recently released survey of carbon accounting tools and methods (6-21, p. 4).

Given that impetus, the trucking industry wanted “a layman’s guide to the [reporting] tools, and how they can best be utilized to quantify emissions,” said Don Osterberg, senior vice president of safety and driver training for truckload carrier Schneider National Inc.

Osterberg also is the chairman of ATRI’s research advisory committee.

A layman’s guide is essential for trucking companies that only now are getting around to their customers’ requests to calculate an annual carbon footprint because “subtle variations in the carbon models can result in considerable differences in carbon calculation outputs,” Osterberg told Transport Topics.

In other words, “you can go any number of places or use any number of tools, and you may not get the same answer every time you” calculate your business’ emissions, Tunnell said.

The five individual methods that ATRI examined were published by the Carbon Disclosure Project, the Global Reporting Initiative, the Climate Registry, Climate Leaders and SmartWay, the Environmental Protection Agency’s voluntary partnership with the transportation industry.

Each of the groups draws on carbon accounting methods created by World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

ATRI said SmartWay was the standout of the five groups, because the method was devised solely to keep track of transportation-related emissions.

The other four groups focus on what Tunnell called “entity-level” reporting — which is a process that requires a more granular level of accounting than SmartWay provided.

SmartWay factors only emissions created by tractors. While such emissions are likely the largest single part of any carrier’s annual carbon output, most carbon accounting standards require that other emissions be counted. For example, shippers may require a counting of emissions created by electricity consumption, ATRI said.

Under most carbon accounting protocols, a shipper could not fully account for its own carbon emissions unless it includes emissions created in the supply chain — an inclusion that would not be possible without tabulating emissions from truckers.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, announced last year it would require its top suppliers to make a complete accounting of their annual greenhouse gas emissions, including emissions created by goods movement (7-27, p. 1).

Carriers contacted by TT declined to discuss any specific shippers and only Schneider National would comment on the part that shippers played in creating the company’s carbon policy.

Schneider began tracking the carbon emissions of its on-highway trucks in 2004, Osterberg said, adding that “carbon-calculating requests from shippers arrived simultaneously at that time,” and has not since abated.

Schneider is among the largest truckload haulers in the country. Including owner-operators, the carrier uses more than 15,000 power units.

Swift Transportation Co. also prefers the SmartWay method for carbon counting.

“We are comfortable using the SmartWay method to measure carbon,” David Berry, a vice president at Swift, told TT.

Berry would not say whether Swift’s customers had demanded a formal accounting of the carrier’s carbon footprint.

Schneider and Swift’s comments were consistent with ATRI’s findings that most motor carriers, when they account for carbon emissions at all, use the SmartWay calculator.