Redwood Logistics plans to provide emissions tracking technology and the ability to purchase verified carbon offsets to its customers later this year.
The Chicago-based company announced Wednesday that its Redwood Hyperion platform will use data from its logistics platform as a service and RedwoodConnect to automate detailed load-by-load emissions calculations.
“This paired with leveraging the best calculation standards available will provide our customers access to reliable emissions of their total freight footprint that’s difficult to measure otherwise,” Michael Reed, chief product officer at Redwood, told FreightWaves.
Redwood Hyperion is designed to work with Redwood’s existing green initiatives and help customers minimize their carbon footprints and create more sustainable and resilient supply chains.
“With data existing across systems and varying levels of accuracy, we have the integration capability and flexibility to fetch the right data and adapt it to calculate reliable emissions metrics,” Reed said.
“Redwood Hyperion provides detailed load-by-load supply chain emissions metrics using primary data direct from source systems.”
Carbon offsets for freight movements
Measuring emissions is the first step toward reducing them and helping companies reach their sustainability targets. The ability to purchase carbon offsets using Redwood Hyperion is meant to help companies reduce operational impacts that can’t be reduced in the short term.
There is a lot of debate about how beneficial carbon offsets are. If they are not purchased through reputable organizations, they may not be monitored accurately. Even with trustworthy organizations, some offsetting strategies such as planting trees cannot guarantee that carbon will be sequestered in the case of a fire, flood or drought.
But the freight industry is difficult to decarbonize, especially if companies want to reduce emissions quickly without having to pay larger upfront costs for alternative fuel or electric vehicles. That’s where offsets come in.
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Redwood did not disclose which projects and registries it will use for carbon offsets. Reed said customers will be able to choose among biodiversity projects, nature-based projects or projects geographically close to their operations.
“Until alternatives like EVs or biofuel become the norm, moving freight burns fuel. Carbon offsets will be a factor towards carbon-neutral shipping efforts and an incentive to improve your carbon footprint,” Reed said.
Redwood Eco Advisory can recommend strategies to reduce emissions, such as modal conversion, load consolidation or network optimization, Reed said. What emissions are left can be offset using Redwood Hyperion.
The history of Hyperion
The calculator gets its name from a coastal redwood tree in California that ranks as the “tallest living tree in the world.” It was measured at over 380 feet tall in 2019, and it’s estimated to be 600 to 800 years old, according to the Guinness World Records.
“Hyperion was selected as Redwood’s recognizable symbol of climate change while further strengthening Redwood’s logistics platform as a service ecosystem, bridging the gap between logistics and technology through an interconnected and open platform that allows for effortless scaling and logistics network design,” a release said.
Coastal redwoods can absorb as much as 250 times the amount of carbon dioxide as other trees, according to the release.
“As the world moves in a greener, cleaner and more efficient direction, it is paramount that our supply chains lead the way,” Reed said. “Going carbon neutral can seem daunting and complex, but we’re working to change that.”
Click here for more FreightWaves articles by Alyssa Sporrer.
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