Co2 emissions of French shippers: The roles of delivery frequency and weight, mode choice, and distance

Abstract

In this article, we describe the effects of delivery frequency, mode choice, distance, and shipment weight on the CO2 emissions of French shippers, taking advantage of a 2004 survey of French shippers (ECHO) which describes the characteristics of 3000 shippers, 10,000 shipments, and 20,000 transport chain legs.Once the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of every shipment have been computed, they are divided by the corresponding number of ton-kilometres in order to find their carbon intensity (in grammes of CO2 per ton-kilometre). We then analyse the latter with respect to a number of selected shipment characteristics: shipment frequency and mode choice (planning choices), and Euclidean distance and yearly tonnage shipped to the same customer (transport demand). We also develop two log-linear regression models in which carbon intensity is assumed to be caused by these characteristics. We find that shippers' transport planning choices have at least as much impact on carbon intensity as the characteristics of transport demand.