sustainable transport
The Future of
Freight
hUpac
Across most of Europe, trains run on electric power. Where the
power comes from hydroelectric dams, transport is carbon-free.
Americans eat a lot of lettuce — about 30 pounds per capita nnually, according to the U.S. Department of agriculture. That means my salad-eating household is pretty typical: We use a couple of heads
each week. and we live in Colorado, about
1,000 miles from the nearest large commercial
lettuce patch.
lettuce gets to us on refrigerated trucks,
packed 24 heads to a 40-lb (18-kg) carton, with
900 to 1,000 cartons per truck. From a cold warehouse in arizona or California, it travels over
interstate highways at an average speed, allowing
for stops, of 48 mph (77 kph). The trucks burn
diesel fuel at the rate of about 6 miles per gallon
( 2. 55 kilometers per liter), and the refrigerated
trailers burn another gallon per hour to keep the
lettuce at about 36°F ( 3°C). a little rough arithmetic suggests that if you shop for groceries on
the East Coast, a 28-oz (0.8-kg) head of lettuce
represents about 0.023 gallon of diesel fuel for
transport. Total transport cost, including all the
costs of operating the truck, comes to about 40
cents per head. (The farmer sells lettuce for about
50 to 70 cents per head, of which about 13 cents
represents the cost of labor.) after warehousing
and brokerage fees, wholesale cost to the grocer
may be $1.20 to $1.50 per head, depending on
supply. Transport represents 25 to 30 percent of
the grocer’s cost.
The numbers look modest, but this repre-
sents about 340,000 truckloads annually, burn-
ing about 75 million gallons of diesel fuel and
emitting about 1 million tons of carbon dioxide.
remember, this is for lettuce only. The trucking
industry says its 15 million trucks move about
10 billion tons of freight annually over about
433 billion miles, burning 44 billion gallons of
diesel. Even a small improvement in transport
efficiency can save a lot of fuel, money and car-
bon pollution.
coast-to-coast refrigerated rail service for produce. railEx can carry the equivalent of 700
truckloads of produce weekly from intermodal
centers in central California and eastern Washington, offloading after a five-day trip near albany, N. Y. Unless they can collect a load of Maine
potatoes, the refrigerated trains make the westbound trip empty. railEx is a start, but right now,
Nonetheless, the economies are promising
enough that several companies have launched Trucks cross the Alps in any weather, behind electric locomotives, while drivers sleep in a coach car.
Why trucks trump trains
in a 2008 study for the produce growers of
Monterey County, Calif., economist Jonathan
Mun calculated that shipping by rail instead of
truck would save 67 percent of the carbon footprint and about $227 million per year — and
potentially a lot more if we ever see a price on
transport-related carbon emissions. The barrier
lies in railroad infrastructure: railroads have
refrigerated rolling stock capable of carrying less
than 10 percent of the county’s produce, and
rail lines come nowhere near the farms or grocery stores. produce would have to be trucked
to an “intermodal center” (a refrigerated warehouse where cartons are transferred from truck
to train), hauled cross-country at about 18 mph
( 30 kph) behind slow coal trains, transferred
again and trucked to grocery stores. Transfers
would add two or three days to shipping time
and create a couple more opportunities for food
contamination.
hUpac
