We were featured in the February issue of Supply Chain Digital.  Read it here.

This week a new website called shippingefficiency.org was launched by the Carbon War Room, co-founded by Sir Richard Branson.  The site offers vessel specific emissions information across a range of different carriers.  This is a huge step toward enabling companies to evaluate the methods they use to move products via ocean.  We are embracing this information and are using it to improve the accuracy of our ocean emissions accounting platform.

The website provides a long list of ocean going vessels and rates them for efficiency between levels A through G.  Each level has a unique emissions factor that can be used to measure the emissions for that vessel.

We’ve had an exciting last few months as we’ve started the beta testing of our freight dashboard.  We’ve been busily working away to introduce an automated, enterprise-wide transportation emissions platform for medium and large businesses.  Sustainable Business Oregon recently published an article about us that provides a nice update.  There will be more to come soon.

GreenShipping Targets Carbon Reduction

Earlier this holiday season, these two great green minded publication, Mother Nature Network and Green Hands USA, featured Green Shipping in their journals.  Take a look and while your there feel free to write a comment on these posts thanking them for their support!

Mother Nature Network:  MNN is a one stop shop for anyone looking to green their life.  From the simple tasks of recycling to the more complex undertakings of remodeling your home the green way, MNN is a great resource for helping you help mother nature.

Green Hands USA: “Local Action, Global Reaction” Green Hands USA is a volunteer network and green resource center for anyone who would like to lend a helping hand in a green project.

On October 8, 2009 UPS announced that they are launching a program that allows customers an option to purchase a carbon offset any time they ship a package. UPS customers pay a flat fee of $0.05 cents for ground shipments and $0.20 cents for air shipments. Certified offsets are purchased which support of variety of different programs including waste water treatment, landfill gas destruction and wetland restoration.

As a company dedicated to creating carbon neutral shipments, Green Shipping (www.greenshipping.com) is glad to see that other organizations are beginning to consider their shipment emissions and offer ways to offset them. “What is good for the environment is also good business.” Reducing the CO2 emitted by packages will help in the fight against climate change. Green Shipping offers a comprehensive carbon neutral shipping solution and supports shipments from UPS, FedEx, USPS as well as freight carriers. Green Shipping uses the weight, mode of transportation, and routing information for each and every shipment in order to provide the most accurate carbon footprint calculation available.
With Green Shipping, participating businesses can use their environmental commitment as a competitive advantage. Certified Green Shippers can display the Green Shipping logo on their website and in communication to their customers. With the Green Shipping iTrack™ package tracking tool, businesses can quickly and easily enable package tracking on their website and provide customers with a one stop solution for information on their orders. Green Shipping offsets the environmental impacts of customer shipments with purchases from Bonneville Environment Foundation who was award the EPA 2009 Green Energy Supplier of the Year award and is leading the way to a cleaner environment.
For more info on Green Shipping’s carbon neutral shipping solution, check out our short video
For more info on UPS carbon neutral shipping click here

PORTLAND, Ore. – September 15, 2009 The Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF), an entrepreneurial supplier of green power solutions, announced today that it has won two Green Power Leadership Awards- an awards program jointly sponsored by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and the Center for Resource Solutions (CRS). BEF has been recognized as the Best Green Power Supplier of the Year and its Solar 4R Schools program won Best Green Power Education Outreach Program in the Market Development Category . Award winners were announced during the Renewable Energy Markets Conference being held in Atlanta, GA this week.

Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) was founded in Portland, Oregon in 1998. BEF is a national, nonprofit organization and has played a major role in the development of the carbon offset market. In 2000, BEF helped to create the voluntary market for carbon offsets by closing the first retail REC trade deal with the Environmental Protection Agency. They also launched the first online carbon calculator in 2001.

The partnership between Greenshipping.com and BEF Carbon Offsets, empowers organizations and individuals to dedicate funds to the development of renewable energy sources like solar power and wind farms, while at the same time making their package shipments carbon neutral. We are glad to have BEF as our partner and know that with their help, Greenshipping.com and our customers will reduce climate change.

The Fast Company article by James Hofflin hits the nail right on the head. Companies, particularly retailers, are beginning to actively engage in greening up. From conservation, to recycling, reducing and reusing, many retailers are thinking about their footprint and acting to reduce it. But… most of these green activities are taking place inside the store, office or in manufacturing. This leaves out a huge part of retailers Co2 emissions.

Transportation and shipping throughout the supply chain, from the supplier, to the manufacturer, to the retailer and the customer is most likely the largest carbon emitter of a company’s operations. So, why haven’t retailers thought about this? The most likely answer is that up till now, greening up your transportation and shipping meant leaning up your operations, investing in new trucks and strategiizing different routes. But now with Greenshipping.com, this daunting task is a bit more simple.

We agree that companies have to consider the entirety of their transportation and logistics to come up with the greenest solution. For example, Investing in renewable energy is one of the best ways to offset your transportation and shipping emissions. Greenshipping.com is happy have this opportunity to help businesses go green.

So, what would happen if USPS decided to reduce or cut Saturday delivery service?  According to some investigative research on this very question by Pablo Paster of Treehugger, the atmosphere might become a much cleaner place.

Currently, USPS drivers spend a total of 1.2 billion miles on the road each year and 90% is attributed to letter delivery.  “Cutting six days of home delivery service to five days would cut the miles driven by delivery operations by 1/6th, or 167 million miles.”  Potential savings of GHG emissions to our atmosphere due to this cut back would be around 211 million pounds per day.

Sounds like a pretty good idea.