Environmental management was first developed as a response to new environmental regulations being imposed on companies. It soon evolved beyond its initial, narrow, technical approach as managers started to perceive environmental issues as realities that needed to be incorporated into business strategy (Walley and Whitehead, 1994). Environmental management has both short and long-term consequences, affecting the current performance and long-term sustainability of businesses. Carbon management is a relatively new part of this process, gaining in signifi-cance in light of the climate change threat. Carbon management should not, however, be implemented in isolation. It is important to create one comprehensive environmental strategy and understand the potential trade-offs between its constituent parts. The Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA, 2008) defines an EMS as ‘a struc-tured framework for managing an organization’s significant impact on the environment’. These impacts can include business waste, emissions, energy use, transport and consumption of materials and, increasingly, climate change factors.
table 2.6 Emission standards for heavy-duty diesel engines (g/kWh)
tier Date of
implementation Co hC nox Pm
Euro I 1992 (>85kw) 4.5 1.1 8.0 0.36
Euro II 1998 4.0 1.1 7.0 0.15
Euro III 2000 2.1 0.66 5.0 0.10
Euro IV 2005 1.5 0.46 3.5 0.02
Euro V 2008 1.5 0.46 2.0 0.02
Euro VI 2013 1.5 0.13 0.4 0.01
Source: www.nao.org.uk.
ISO 14000 and 14001
For companies that want certification of their environmental credentials there exists a series of international standards, namely the ISO 14000 series. These are a set of voluntary standards and guideline references for companies aiming to minimize their environmental impact. ISO 14001, which was published in 1996, is the only standard in the ISO 14000 series for which certification by an external authority is available, and concerns the specification of requirements for a company’s environmental management system.
Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS)
This is a voluntary European-wide standard introduced by the European Union and applied to all European countries. It was formally introduced into the UK in April 1995. According to the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA, 2008), the aim of EMAS is ‘to recognize and reward those organizations that go beyond minimum legal compliance and continuously improve their environmental performance’.
Participating organizations must regularly produce a public environ-mental statement, checked by an independent environenviron-mental verifier that reports on their environmental performance.
BS7750
The UK has its own standard, designed to be compatible with EMAS and ISO 14001. BS7750 is designed to help companies to evaluate their performance and to define their policy, practices, objectives and targets in relation to the environment. It requires the support of senior management, and describes policies for the benefit of both staff and the general public.
mEAsurIng thE EnvIronmEntAl ImpACt of frEIght trAnsport
Macro-level assessment
Although the importance of measuring the environmental impact of pollution is universally recognized, in practice it is complex and there is no single, agreed method of so doing. Instead, there are several meas-urement methods, all yielding slightly different figures. The UK government makes a distinction between emissions from the ‘end user’
and emissions from ‘source’. End-user figures include an estimate of emissions from upstream sources such as power stations and refineries, which are allocated to activities that use the electricity or fuel. This estimate equates to the ‘well-to-wheel’ definition. Source figures, on the
other hand, allocate emission figures according to where the fuel is consumed and do not include the emissions from upstream sources.
Tail-pipe emissions are an even narrower category of emissions meas-urement that measures the pollution that is emitted from the tail-pipe (or the exhaust pipe) of a vehicle. This is probably the crudest of all measures as it ignores all upstream pollution sources and all other output sources (such as those from the engine).
An important distinction can be made between top-down and bottom-up approaches to the estimation of energy use and emissions (McKinnon and Piecyk, 2009). The former approach measures total fuel consumption by transport and uses standard conversion factors to translate it into macro-level emission figures. In the UK, however, diesel fuel purchases are not differentiated by vehicle type at point of sale, making it very difficult to estimate the quantity of fuel consumed by freight vehicles (as opposed to buses and diesel cars). As far as road freight is concerned, the bottom-up approach is now deemed the more accurate. This involves surveying a large sample of HGV operators (as part of the Continuing Survey of Road Goods Transport) and enquiring about the distances their vehicles travel and quantities of fuel consumed.
These fuel consumption estimates are grossed-up for the truck fleet as a whole and converted into emission values. No comparable surveys of fuel consumption are undertaken in the UK rail, air and shipping services, making it difficult to derive UK-specific emission estimates for these modes.
Within Europe, several organizations have compiled databases showing the environmental impact of the different freight transport modes (eg INFRAS, 2004; IFEU, 2008; TREMOVE, 2008). Table 2.7 summarizes one set of energy consumption and emissions estimates for the most atmos-pheric pollutants. It highlights the wide variations in the levels of emis-sions per tonne-km and potential benefits of shifting freight to more environmentally friendly transport modes, such as rail and water. The opportunities for modal shift are discussed in Chapter 6.
One must exercise caution, however, in interpreting comparative envi-ronmental data for freight transport modes (McKinnon, 2008), as the relative environmental performance of a particular mode can be affected by:
differing assumptions about the utilization of vehicle capacity;
•
use of tonne-kms as the denominator, misrepresenting modes
special-• izing in the movement of lower-density cargos;
extrapolation of emissions data from one country to another with
• different transport and energy systems;
allocation of emissions between freight and passenger traffic sharing
• the same vehicles (such as aircraft and ferries);
neglect of emissions associated with the construction and
mainte-• nance of infrastructure;
restriction of the analysis to emissions at source rather than
‘well-to-•
wheel’ data.
Micro-level assessment
The externalities associated with freight transport can be disaggregated in various ways:
By geographical area: local authorities now closely monitor air quality
•
and noise levels and, in some cases, can attribute these environmental impacts to particular categories of traffic. Transport for London, for example, estimated that prior to the introduction of the Low Emission Zone, road transport accounted for roughly half of all NOx and PM10 emissions in Central London, with most of them coming from the exhausts of HGVs (Fairholme, 2007).
table 2.7 Average emission factors for freight transport modes within Europe
eC
(kj/tkm) Co2
(g/tkm) nox
(mg/tkm)so2
(mg/tkm) nmhC
(mg/tkm) Pmdir (mg/tkm)
Aircraft 9,876 656 3,253 864 389 46
Truck
>34–40-t Euro 1 1,086 72 683 75 21
Euro 2 1,044 69 755 55 10
Euro 3 1,082 72 553 90 54 12
Euro 4 1,050 70 353 59 2
Euro 5 996 66 205 58 2
Train Diesel 530 35 549 44 62 17
Electric 456 18 32 64 4 4.6
Water-
way Upstream 727 49 839 82 84 26
Down-stream 438 29 506 49 51 16
EC = energy consumption, NMHC = non-methane hydrocarbons.
Source: IFEU (2008).
By company: an increasing number of businesses, as part of their
•
corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes, are monitoring the environmental impact of their freight transport operations. Major logistics companies such as UPS and DHL now publish annual envi-ronmental reports detailing the levels of pollutant emissions from their transport fleets.
By customer: some companies can now estimate the environmental
• effects of distributing their products to particular customers. They can offer their client distribution by different modes and routes, each with a differing set of environmental impacts.
By product: life cycle analysis (LCA) is a ‘technique to assess the
envi-• ronmental effects and resource costs associated with a product, process, or service’ (Environmental Protection Agency, 2006: 1). It generally does this on a ‘cradle-to-grave’ basis from raw material source through production, distribution and consumption to the point where the materials return to the earth. Freight transport is an integral part of this process and has its environmental impacts disaggregated to product level in the course of LCA.
In recent years, the assessment of environmental impacts at the company and product levels has been focused on GHG emissions. As climate change has risen up political and corporate agendas there has been a steep growth of interest in carbon footprinting. Unlike LCA, which inherently analyses a broad range of external effects, carbon footprinting is confined to GHG emissions (PAS 2050, 2008). The next chapter examines in detail how it is being applied both by individual companies and across supply chains.
notEs
1. Radiative forcing is the difference between the amounts of incoming and outgoing radiation energy measured at the troposphere.
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