New Zealand’s road transport industry is tackling decarbonisation in partnership with an international road freight body representing more than three million companies across the globe.
The Green Compact was officially launched by road freight body Transporting NZ at an Auckland event on February 24 hosted by Bridgestone NZ with guests including transport minister Michael Wood.
The industry-led initiative is a roadmap to decarbonising commercial road transport by 2050 based on six key pillars: alternative fuels, efficient logistics, collective mobility, vehicle technologies, driver training and green infrastructure.
Transporting NZ, which represents 1200 road freight companies, adapted the policy from the International Road Transport Union (IRU), which represents 3.5 million road transport firms around the world.
‘Low-hanging fruit’
Transporting NZ chief executive Nick Leggett says the industry knows green freight technology is going to accelerate quickly, however full decarbonisation could still be decades away.
“That is why our Green Compact emphasises practical, immediate methods to lower emissions – the ‘low-hanging fruit.’ These enduring principles will guide our industry on its policy approach to officials and successive Governments,” he says.
Leggett says emissions can be reduced today through fuel efficient driving, larger vehicles in key freight areas, and efficient logistics.
“Better roading design and quality will not only lower emissions, it will make our transport system far more resilient so that we can withstand extreme weather events,” Leggett says.
The pillars aims to play an important part in CO2 reduction, along with the growing number of smaller battery electric trucks on the road, and hydrogen vehicles entering service.
“It is critical for the road freight sector to demonstrate to its customers and the wider public how the industry is reducing emissions and is committed to sustainability.
“It’s up to industry to show we’re acting in the here and now. That means doing what we can to reduce emissions and embracing sustainable practices, and supporting the government to build back roads that will withstand the weather, and keep people safe. We are not waiting passively for regulation or technology to determine the future,” Leggett says.
Speaking via a video recording from Geneva, Switzerland, IRU secretary general Umberto de Pretto congratulated Transporting NZ on the Green Compact launch.
“The global road transport family is committed to help reduce CO2 emissions and meet climate targets by 2050.
“Our collective long-term roadmap for industry is to become fully carbon natural by 2050. This is an enormous challenge, we need to decarbonise our operations and services but at the same time we need to continue keeping logistics moving.
“We can’t do this alone, we have to work hand in hand with the government regulators, our suppliers and our clients. By working together we can decarbonise our fleets and keep delivering road transport’s social and economic benefits,” de Pretto says.
Industry working together
Bridgestone NZ director John Staples welcomed the initiative as a significant step forward for the industry.
“Bridgestone will wholeheartedly support this framework and contribute where we can to the efforts of research and implementation into the industry.
“This framework has strong alignment to the global and local priorities of Bridgestone, in line with our vision towards 2050 of evolving towards a sustainable solutions company.
“Like the framework outlined in the Green Compact, Bridgestone has a global commitment towards carbon neutrality by 2050, and we can only do this by working together with our customers and the industry to achieve our goals in partnership. It is impossible to do this alone.”
Tackling the ‘source of the problem’
Meanwhile, Michael Wood says it’s important that big goals such as decarbonisation are done in partnership with the industry.
“We don’t get this big stuff done unless we have public sector and private sector working together problem solving and drawing off the strengths that we each have,” he says.
Wood acknowledged the devastation caused by Cyclone Gabrielle and says once the transport networks are restored there will be bigger questions to be asked of the freight network.
“Beyond that there’s a bigger job getting to grips with how we build up a resilient transport system across all modes that is going to be able to better withstand some of these challenges we face as extreme weather deriving from climate change becomes not the exception but more of a norm.
“If we only focus on the resilience on building better, tougher infrastructure and getting the infrastructure in the right places to deal with climate change we are only doing half the job. We’ve got to tackle the source of the problem and that is the ongoing huge volume of emissions that we continue to create across many parts of our economy and society that will make this problem worse in years to come if we don’t deal with it.
“Here in New Zealand the big game is in agriculture and transport …The good news is that we know we can make a difference when we come together and have collective purpose and get the right polices in place,” Wood says.
A catalogue of learnings
The government’s Low Emissions Transport Fund administered by the Energy Efficiency & Conservation Authority’s (EECA) is one major scheme helping assist road transport companies on their journey to zero emissions freight.
Transport makes up around 20% of New Zealand’s emissions and heavy vehicle emissions make up around a quarter of that amount.
EECA transport portfolio manager Richard Briggs says the authority has now rolled out 16 transport funding rounds since 2016.
It has included 34 unique projects in the heavy vehicle space with around $10 million in public money going towards this.
Briggs says has been “a lot of scepticism and push back” to some of the projects but he points to Auckland Transport’s proposed Zero Emissions Area (ZEA) trial using Fuso eCanters as one example where the doubters were proven wrong.
“A result of that trial is that scepticism was not only overcome through the demonstrations that it could technically do the job, the drivers of those vehicles are now fully supportive of that project,” Briggs says.
“Essentially what we’re doing is building a catalogue of learnings and information and we can then create some guidance for transitioning fleets.”
Briggs says ECCA now has a lot of information at hand which can help transport companies make some important planning decisions around their vehicle fleets.
However, he says it’s also important companies focus on other initiatives such as driver training, as simply changing a vehicle from a diesel to an electric is not the full piece of the puzzle.
Briggs says energy efficiency is still at the core of what ECCA does and operators have to think about how to create more efficiencies in the freight network which look beyond just purchasing electric vehicles.
