News

ESC's Customers' Charter goes Green to address Sustainable Shipping

Friday, 30 September 2011

At ESC’s Shipper Forum “Greening the Maritime Supply Chain” which took place in Brussels on Wednesday 28th September a revised customers’ charter for a Sustainable Liner Shipping Industry was presented by ESC's Secretary General, Nicolette van der Jagt.

 Over recent weeks ESC revised a charter that addressed the relationship that should exist between the shipper and the carrier in relation to service performance, contractual practices and free market principles.

In presenting the charter, Ms van der Jagt said: "The relationship should be a cooperative relationship, a pro-active relationship, in which both parties - shippers and carriers - share a responsibility for finding solutions and sticking to agreements. And within this we have extended the charter to address the growing requirement of environmental sustainability of the maritime supply chain.” "While price, efficiency and reliability remain the dominant sourcing criteria for shippers, sustainability - and within this the environmental record of carriers - is rapidly growing in importance as a criteria for choosing carriers.

"Shippers expect Shipping lines to address their own environmental record with ambitious targets to reduce emissions of green house gases and other pollutants through efficient operational practices and application of new technology.”

"In return carriers should expect customers’ cooperation to assist in finding practical logistical or supply chain solutions to help improve as appropriate the shipping line’s efficiency and minimise costs and environmental impact." 

The Shipper Forum revealed how difficult it can be to extract reliable data on ships' emissions from the shipping industry, but also revealed a number of significant initiatives that could significantly help. "There are a lot of people working hard on ways to measure emissions from ships and related activities, and we talked about trying to bring some of those initiatives together and establishing a common standard for this" explained Ms van der Jagt. "There is a lot of support for this and our Forum has helped move this a step closer with certain groups agreeing to discuss further and cooperate."

The ESC meanwhile has been exploring with the industry further ways of removing waste from the maritime supply chain: "Earlier this year we opened up the debate on the grey box concept again. While we can see the difficult issues surrounding this in practice, we have been able to help with the initiation of a pilot project whereby a carrier, in this case CMA-CGM, gains greater visibility over some of its customers' freight flows - drawn from the Dutch Shippers' Council (EVO), with a view to reducing empty container movements. That could result in lower costs, the benefits shared between the carrier and the shipper, and significant reductions in the carbon footprint. We know other models exist, but let's see how effective this approach is, and maybe look to other pilots and the other models also."

In conclusion, Ms van der Jagt said, "This is what we mean by cooperation between shippers and carriers in trying to make the supply chain more environmentally sustainable. It is clearly becoming a more important issue for shippers and the shipping industry. If we could operate according to the principles contained within our customers' charter for sustainable shipping we would have the ideal conditions for achieving the greatest results possible. We will continue to explore how industry can mitigate the negative impacts of possible new regulation and take advantage of the positive outcome from these Green House Gas-reducing measures."