Industry News
ECG appoints FOE (Italy) to produce a CO2 footprint standard
17th October 2007
ECG, the Association of European Vehicle Logistics, has commissioned Friends of the Earth (Italy) to study ‘The External Costs of Logistics of Vehicles, Uniform European Values to Measure the Company’s Environmental Performance.’
The study will be completed in six months and is to provide a set of reference data allowing the measurement of the external cost of transport for new vehicles (including the indirect cost not borne by logistics operators but falling onto the wider public: CO2 emissions, air pollution, noise, congestion, accidents). In particular the study will provide a standard to measure CO2 emissions per kilometre and per single car transported by road, rail or sea.
The ECG / FoE (Italy) CO2 Standard will allow measurement of the emissions of:
- Trucks with Euro 3, Euro4 and Euro 5 engines with the car transporters loading ratio ranging from empty to fully loaded
- Electric and diesel trains with 22 wagons
- Pure Car Carrier ships in two sizes: fewer than 2,000 cars and 5,000 cars or more.
The study will highlight many of the inefficiencies affecting the distribution of cars and commercial vehicles, and hopefully cut the kilometres that car transporters run empty. The necessity to cut inefficiencies was the other major subject of the 11th ECG conference, during which the ECG launched a “Common Efficiency Improvement Program”, a platform for the industry as a whole – including logistics service providers and car manufacturers.
An ECG Operations Quality Manual has also been developed, with contributions from BMW, Ford, GM, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Seat and Volvo. ECG is now working to create a Damage Reporting standard, a volume prediction model, and a common data platform.
(www.eurocartrans.org)
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