SmartWay Alters Its System for Ranking Fleet Emissions
This story appears in the Oct. 29 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
SmartWay, the government’s partnership with the freight industry to improve fuel efficiency and reduce trucking’s carbon footprint, has changed its system for ranking carriers on how well they reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions.
The new system sorts carriers into a series of categories that did not exist under the original ranking system begun when the Environmental Protection Agency and the transportation industry created SmartWay in 2004.
SmartWay recently posted the system on its website, although there was no formal announcement.
“We updated our partner tools to improve the transparency of our data, the usability of results for partners, and to be more consistent with current approaches in supply chain carbon accounting,” SmartWay said in a statement prepared for Transport Topics.
“The new system’s trying to compare apples to apples,” said Glen Kedzie, vice president for environmental affairs and assistant general counsel of American Trucking Associations.
“That’s why they’re comparing flatbed to flatbed. . . . they got very specific here,” Kedzie said. “They got into auto hauling, and moving and expediting and tanker. You can see all the categories, so you should be able to fairly compete against someone who does like carries.”
Under SmartWay’s old system, carriers complained they were “lopped” into categories where input data on emissions were not adjusted to specific truck types, Kedzie said.
The old system was “like a one size fits all, and a flatbed’s a lot more different than a 53-foot box,” he said.
Carriers in the SmartWay program agree to submit their emissions data and to be ranked relative to how well they stack up against other carriers when it comes to reducing emissions.
In exchange, carriers are allowed to advertise their membership and to display SmartWay logos that indicate they are green companies.
Logistics companies and shippers that also become SmartWay partners can use the rankings to choose carriers.
Meanwhile, SmartWay and EPA have ongoing testing programs that provide information to the transportation industry about which practices and products — be they tires, mud flaps or aerodynamic truck designs — produce the greatest fuel savings.
In addition to better sorting carriers, the new system also changed how the ranking system works.
“Previously, partner results were publicly expressed as falling into one of three ranked, indexed ranges that combined the CO2, NOx and [particulate matter} performance of their combined operations,” SmartWay said.
The three ranges were called bins. Under the new system, carriers now fall into five performance ranges for each individual pollutant. Those five ranges are expressed as 20th percentiles.
The public can view which percentile a specific carrier falls into and what the median score is for carriers in that percentile. However, only the carriers, logistics companies and shippers that are SmartWay partners can see a carrier’s specific score.
