Environmental benefits from reducing empty container movements : A Life Cycle Assessment and analysis of strategies to reduce empty container repositioning

Abstract: Containers are responsible for holding almost all the worlds cargo while being transported. Even though container shipping is the preferred transportation mean when it comes to the environment, the environmental burdens it causes are significant. An approach to lessen the burdens from the industry is to look at different optimization measures, such as avoiding or reducing empty container repositioning (ECR). In this study a implementation approach that already exist, since a few years was chosen - the online container sharing platform provided by xChange which offers one-way leasing.  The problem of ECR occurs after a container has been off-loaded and emptied at the end- location. It is caused by several reasons which are revealed in this report together with measures to reduce these ECR moves. The aim of this study was to explore how well a specific optimization measure could decrease ECR and also the environmental benefits it could lead to. The specific research objective is to explore; The environmental benefits that can be achieved by reducing ECR in container shipping and said strategy’s potential feasibility. To answer this, the following research questions have been formulated: How feasible is it to reduce ECR through sharing containers on an online platform? What is the environmental impact of decreasing ECR in the maritime shipping industry?  The approaches to answer these questions were a literature review of ECR strategies, SWOT analysis and a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). To conduct the LCA a free online tool was chosen with purpose to give transparency and awareness to actors within the industry about available tools that could help them estimate their environmental impacts. The results indicate on potential of implementing such a optimization measure on the whole industry and also shows significant environmental savings when considering the hundreds of million containers being shipped each year.