Environmental sustainability in container transport: the attitudes of shippers and forwarders

ABSTRACT

The transport sector accounts for 25% of the global CO₂ emissions. All firms in the transport industry share a responsibility for this environmental impact. This paper explores, as one of the first, the attitude of both shippers and forwarders, as the main purchasers of transport services, towards environmental sustainability in the sourcing of transport services. Based on a literature review we develop several hypotheses and test those through a survey among shippers and forwarders in the Netherlands. We conclude that shippers focus more on sustainability than forwarders, the size of shippers has a positive influence on the demand for transparency of the environmental performance, explicit sustainability targets have a positive influence on the demand for sustainable solutions and the vast majority of shippers and forwarders expect an increased importance of sustainable purchasing.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable transport
• shippers
• forwarders
• strategies

Acknowledgements

This research would not have been possible without the support of FENEX and EVO. We are very thankful for their time and cooperation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Roy Van den Berg http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6640-6180

Peter W. De Langen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7703-5370

Notes

1. The Clean Cargo working group is a global business-to-business group of companies set up by BSR (Business for Social Responsibility) to improve the environmental performance in marine container transport through measurement, evaluation and reporting. GreenFreight Europe is an independent voluntary programme for improving environmental performance of road freight transport in Europe with multinational shippers, carriers, retailers and associations as members. The World Port Climate Initiative was initiated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by taking measures as port authorities. Examples of initiatives are the environmental ship index and initiatives to promote the use of shore power and LNG as a shipping fuel. EcoPorts, an initiative of European ports and now incorporated in the European Sea Ports Organisation (ESPO), supplies tools to their members to review and take measures for greening the port.

2. In our review of the literature, with the aim to develop hypotheses, we have not only studied the literature specifically on forwarders – which is quite limited, but have also reviewed the literature on logistics service providers, a broader ‘group’ that includes freight forwarders.

3. For one question answer categories had to be combined to meet the test requirements. This resulted in the use of the Fischer’s exact test. These results also indicated that there is no significant relationship between the early and late respondents.

4. When two outliers (respondents with 30,000 and 34,000 containers per year) are deleted, the relationship remains significant (r = 0.341, sign. 0.021, two tailed with α = 0.05).

5. These results are based on 142 responses; we deleted 6 responses (‘don’t know’).

6. The negative correlations can be explained by the score given to the importance (i.e. the higher the importance the lower the score the respondents had to give).

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the Dutch Institute for Advanced Logistics (DINALOG) and is part of a research project on efficient multimodal hinterland networks.