The Environmental Impact of Different Forms of Shipping

Social awareness of climate change and pollution have changed the way that modes of international shipping work. The entire shipping industry has made great strides in recent years to lessen environmental impact and pollution output. The shipping industry is so big that it can’t help but make a footprint, but at least there are improvements being made that help make all forms of shipping more efficient.

Environmental Impact

Is there an environmentally sound way of shipping? There’s no way to ship without creating some environmental impact. Slower forms of international shipping do tend to be less impactful. This means that shipping by rail is less impactful than shipping by truck. Shipping by ocean is less impactful than shipping by air.

The trade-offs in time don’t always suit a business’s needs, however. If something needs to be there in days, you can’t choose an option like ocean shipping that will take weeks.

In addition, whatever’s being shipped also needs to be considered. Shipping medical supplies in a refrigerated container demands a lot of energy to keep the container cold. The faster you ship, the less energy is needed to maintain that cold over time. This means that faster modes of shipping close the gap fairly quickly because slower modes would need to devote so much energy to refrigeration over weeks instead of days.

Other Factors

It’s also worth noting that ocean shipping has only just employed rules regarding the dumping of ballast water from one section of the world into another section. If a vessel has hauled ballast water across the Pacific, and then dumps it on the other side, microalgae and organisms that aren’t native to that area can quickly wreak ecological damage. Major shipping lines are adhering to the new rules, but we’ve yet to see the level of enforcement for them.

In this way, the environmental impact of different modes of international shipping is often contextual. While rail and ocean shipping are in general less impactful, they are also slower. Shipping by air and shipping by truck is faster, and in many specific cases, faster can help correct a different impact. The best approach is one that combines all these different modes of international shipping.